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A HISTORY OF ENGLISH 
ROMANTICISM IN THE 
NINETEENTH CENTURY 



HENRY A. BEERS 

AuthtfTofA Suittrban Pattoral," "Tkt WaytcfYalt,^''*tc. 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
1 90 1 



ROMANCE. 






My love dwelt in a Northern land. \ 

A gray tower in a forest green 
Was hers, and far on either hand 

The long wash of the waves was seen, 
And leagues on leagues of yellow sand, 

The woven forest boughs between. 

And through the silver Northern light 

The sunset slowly died away, 
And herds of strange deer, lily-white, 

Stole forth among the branches grey ; 
About the coming of the light, 

They fled like ghosts before the day. 

I know not if the forest green 

Still girdles round that castle grey; 

I know not if the boughs between 
The white deer vanish ere the day; 

Above my love the grass is green, 
My heart is colder than the clay. 

ANDREW LANG. 




Copyright, 1901, 

BY 

HENRY HOLT & CO. 



Published November, igor 



The M3RARY OF 

OCNOSESS, 
Ty»o Coriti fttctivLy 

NOV. 13 1?0c 

C..-,- ' ^ KXc " - 
COF , ... 



PREFACE. 



The present volume is a sequel to " A History of Eng- 
lish Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century " (New 
York: Henry Holt & Co., 1899). References in the 
footnotes to "Volume I." are to that work. The difficul- 
ties of this second part of my undertaking have been of 
a kind just opposite to those of the first. As it concerns 
my subject, the eighteenth century was an age of begin- 
nings; and the problem was to discover what latent ro- 
manticism existed in the writings of a period whose spirit, 
upon the whole, was distinctly unromantic. But the tem- 
per of the nineteenth century has been, until recent years, 
prevailingly romantic in the wider meaning of the word. 
And as to the more restricted sense in which I have 
chosen to employ it, the mediasvalising literature of the 
nineteenth century is at least twenty times as great as 
that of the eighteenth, both in bulk and in vakie. Ac- 
cordingly the problem here is one of selection; and of 
selection not from a list of half-forgotten names, like 
Warton and Hurd, but from authors whose work is still 
the daily reading of all educated readers. 

As I had anticipated, objection has been made to the 
narrowness of my definition of romanticism. But every 
writer has a right to make his own definitions; or, at 
least, to say what his book shall be about. I have not 



vi Treface. 

written a history of the " liberal movement in English 
literature"; nor of the "renaissance of wonder"; nor of 
the " emancipation of the ego." Why not have called the 
book, then, "A History of the Mediaeval Revival in Eng- 
land " ? Because I have a clear title to the use of ro- 
mantic in one of its commonest acceptations ; and, for my- 
self, 1 prefer the simple dictionary definition, *' pertaining 
to the style of the Christian and popular literature of the 
Middle Ages," to any of those more pretentious explana- 
tions which seek to express the true inwardness of ro- 
mantic literature by analysing it into its elements, select- 
ing one of these elements as essential, and rejecting all 
the rest as accidental. 

M. Brunetibre. for instance, identifies romanticism with 
lyricism. It is the "emancipation of the ego." This 
formula is made to fit Victor Hugo, and it will fit Byron. 
But M. Brunetibre would surely not deny that Walter 
Scott's work is objective and dramatic quite as often as 
it is lyrical. Yet what Englishman will be satisfied with 
a definition oi romantic vih\ch excludes Scott? Indeed, 
M. Brunetibre himself is respectful to the traditional 
meaning of the word. "Numerous definitions," he says, 
" have been given of Romanticism, and still others are 
continually being offered; and all, or almost all of them, 
contain a part of the truth. Mme. de Stael was right 
when she asserted in her 'Allemagne' that Paganism 
and Christianity, the North and the South, antiquitj' and 
the Middle Ages, having divided between them the his- 
tory of literature, Romanticism in consequence, in con- 
trast to Classicism, was a combination of chivalry, the 
Middle Ages, the literatures of the North, and Christian- 
ity. It should be noted, in this connection, that some 



^Preface. vii 

thirty years later Heinrich Hein e, in the book in which 
he will rewrite Mme. de Stael's, will not give such a very 
different idea of Romanticism." And if, in an analysis 
of the romantic movement throughout Europe, any single 
element in it can lay claim to the leading place, that ele- 
ment seems to me to be the return of each country to its 
national past; in other words, mediaevalism. 

A definition loses its usefulness when it is made to 
connote too much. Professor Herford says that the 
"organising conception" of his "Age of Wordsworth" 
is romanticism. But if Cowper and Wordsworth and 
Shelley are romantic, then almost all the literature of the 
years 1 798-1830 is romantic. I prefer to think of Cow- 
per as a naturalist, of Shelley as an idealist, and of 
Wordsworth as a transcendental realist, and to reserve 
the name romanticist for writers like Scott, Coleridge, 
and Keats; and I think the distinction a serviceable 
one. Again, I have been censured for omitting Blake 
from my former volume. The omission was deliberate, 
not accidental, and the grounds for it were given in the 
preface. Blake was not discovered until rather late in 
the nineteenth century. He was not a link in the chain 
of influence which I was tracing. I am glad to find my 
justification in a passage of Mr. Saintsbury's "History 
of Nineteenth Century Literature " (p. 13): "Blake ex- 
ercised on the literary history of his time no influence, 
and occupied in it no position. . . . The public had 
little opportunity of seeing his pictures, and less of 
reading his books. . . . He was practically an unread 
man." 

But I hope that this second volume may make more 
clear the unity of my design and the limits of my subject. 



viii Treface. 

It is scarcely necessary to add that no absolute estimate 
is attempted of the writers whose works are described in 
this history. They are looked at exclusively from a sin- 
gle point of view. H. A. B. 
April, 1901. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Walter Scott, i 

II, Coleridge, Bowles, and the Pope Controversy, 48 

III. Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the Dante Revival, 90 

IV. The Romantic School in Germany, . . . 132 

V. The Romantic Movement in France, . . 173 

VI. Diffused Romanticism in the Literature of 

THE Nineteenth Century, .... 227 

VII. The Pre-Raphaelites, 282 

VIII. Tendencies and Results, 352 



A HISTORY OF ENGLISH 
ROMANTICISM. 



CHAPTER I. 
TKIlaltcr Scott.* 



It was reserved for Walter Scott, " the Ariosto of the 
North," "the historiographer royal of feudalism," to ac- 
complish the task which his eighteenth-century forerun- 
ners had essayed in vain. He possessed the true en- 
chanter's wand, the historic imagination. With this in 
his hand, he raised the dead past to life, made it once 
more conceivable, made it even actual. Before Scott no 
genius of the highest order had lent itself wholly or 
mainly to retrospection. He is the middle point and the 
culmination of English romanticism. His name is, all 
in all, the most important on our list. " Towards him all 
the lines of the romantic revival converge."! The popu- 
lar ballad, the Gothic romance, the Ossianic poetry, the 

* Scott's translations from the German are considered in 
the author's earlier volume, "A History of English Romanti- 
cism in the Eighteenth Centur5^ " Incidental mention of Scott 
occurs throughout the same volume ; and a few of the things 
there said are repeated, in substance though not in form, in 
the present chapter. It seemed better to risk some repetition 
than to sacrifice fulness of treatment here. 

f "The Development of the English Novel," by Wilbur L. 
Cross, p. 131. 



2 <^ History of English 'Romanticism. 

new German literature, the Scandinavian discoveries, 
these and other scattered rays of influence reach a focus 
in Scott. It is true that his delineation of feudal society 
is not final. There were sides of mediaeval life which he 
did not know, or understand, or sympathize with, and 
some of these have been painted in by later artists. That 
his pictures have a coloring of modern sentiment is no 
arraignment of him but of the genre. All romanticists 
are resurrectionists; their art is an elaborate make-be- 
lieve. It is enough for their purpose if the world which 
they re-create has the look of reality, the verisimile if not 
the verum. That Scott's genius was in extenso rather 
than in intenso ; that his work is largely improvisation ; 
that he was not a miniature, but a distemper painter, 
splashing large canvasses with a coarse brush and gaudy 
pigments, all these are commonplaces of criticism. Scott's 
handling was broad, vigorous, easy, careless, healthy, free. 
He was never subtle, morbid, or fantastic, and had no 
niceties or secrets. He was, as Coleridge said of Schil- 
ler, "master, not of the intense drama of passion, but the 
diffused drama of history." Therefore, because his qual- 
ities were popular and his appeal was made to the people, 
the general reader, he won a hearing for his cause, which 
Coleridge or Keats or Tieck, with his closer workman- 
ship, could never have won. He first and he 2X0x1^ popu- 
larised romance. No literature dealing with the feudal 
past has ever had the currency and the universal success 
of Scott's. At no time has medievalism held so large a 
place in comparison with other literary interests as dur- 
ing the years of his greatest vogue, say from 1805 to 1830. 
The first point to be noticed about Scott is the thor- 
oughness of his equipment. While never a scholar in 



Walter Scott. 3 

the academic sense, he was, along certain chosen lines, 
a really learned man. He was thirty-four when he pub- 
lished "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805), the 
first of his series of metrical romances and the first of his 
poems to gain popular favour. But for twenty years he 
had been storing his mind with the history, legends, and 
ballad poetry of the Scottish border, and was already a 
finished antiquarian. The bent and limitations of his 
genius were early determined, and it remained to the end 
wonderfully constant to its object. At the age of twelve 
he had begun a collection of manuscript ballads. His 
education in romance dated from the cradle His lulla- 
bies were Jacobite songs; his grandmother told him tales 
of moss-troopers, and his Aunt Janet read him ballads 
from Ramsay's " Tea-table Miscellany," upon which his 
quick and tenacious memory fastened eagerly. The bal- 
lad of " Hardiknute," in this collection, he knew by heart 
before he could read. " It was the first poem I ever 
learnt — the last I shall ever forget." Dr. Blacklock in- 
troduced the young schoolboy to the poems of Ossian and 
of Spenser, and he committed to memory " whole duans 
of the one and cantos of the other." " Spenser," he says, 
" I could have read forever. Too young to trouble myself 
about the allegory, I considered all the knights and ladies 
and dragons and giants in their outward and exoteric 
sense, and God only knows how delighted I was to find 
myself in such society." A little later Percy's " Rel- 
iques" fell into his hands, with results that have already 
been described.* 

As soon as he got access to the circulating library in 
Edinburgh, he began to devour its works of fiction, char- 
* Vol. i., p. 300. 



4 e^ History of English ^{omanticism. 

acteristically rejecting love stories and domestic tales, 
but laying hold upon " all that was adventurous and ro- 
mantic," and in particular upon " everything which 
touched on knight-errantry." For two or three years he 
used to spend his holidays with his schoolmate, John 
Irving, on Arthur's Seat or Salisbury Crags, where they 
read together books like " The Castle of Otranto " and 
the poems of Spenser and Ariosto; or composed and nar- 
rated to each other " interminable tales of battles and 
enchantments" and "legends in which the martial and 
the miraculous always predominated." The education of 
Edward Waverley, as described in the third chapter of 
Scott's first novel, was confessedly the novelist's own 
education. In the "large Gothic room" which was the 
library of Waverley Honour, the young book-worm pored 
over " old historical chronicles " and the writings of Pulci, 
Froissart, Brantome, and De la Noue; and became "well 
acquainted with Spenser, Drayton, and other poets who 
have exercised themselves on romantic fiction — of all 
themes the most fascinating to a youthful imagination." 

Yet even thus early, a certain solidity was apparent in 
Scott's studies. " To the romances and poetry which I 
chiefly delighted in," he writes, " I had always added the 
study of history, especially as connected with military 
events." He interested himself, for example, in the art 
of fortification ; and when confined to his bed by a child- 
ish illness, found amusement in modelling fortresses and 
" arranging shells and seeds and pebbles so as to repre- 
sent encountering armies, ... I fought my way thus 
through Vertot's ' Knights of Malta ' — a book which, as 
it hoveied between history and romance, was exceedingly 
dear to me." 



Walter Scott. 5 

Every genius is self-educated, and we find Scott from 
the first making instinctive selections and rejections 
among the various kinds of knowledge offered him. At 
school he would learn no Greek, and wrote a theme in 
which he maintained, to the wrath of his teacher, that 
Ariosto was a better poet than Homer. In later life he 
declared that he had forgotten even the letters of the 
Greek alphabet. Latin would have fared as badly, had 
not his interest in Matthew Paris and other monkish 
chroniclers "kept up a kind of familiarity with the lan- 
guage even in its rudest state." " To my Gothic ear, the 
' Stabat Mater,' the ' Dies Irae,' * and some of the other 
hymns of the Catholic Church are more solemn and af- 
fecting than the fine classical poetry of Buchanan." In 
our examination of Scott's early translations from the 
German,! it has been noticed how exclusively he was at- 
tracted by the romantic department of that literature, 
passing over, for instance, Goethe's maturer work, to fix 
upon his juvenile drama "Gotz von Berlichingen." 
Similarly he learned Italian just to read in the original 
the romantic poets Tasso, Ariosto, Boiardo, and Pulci. 
When he first went to London in 1799, "his great anx- 
iety," reports Lockhart, "was to examine the antiquities 
of the Tower and Westminster Abbey, and to make some 
researches among the MSS. of the British Museum." 
From Oxford, which he visited in 1803, he brought away 
only "a grand but indistinct picture of towers and chapels 
and oriels and vaulted halls " ; having met there a recep- 



* The sixth canto of the " Lay" closes with a few lines trans- 
lated from the "Dies Irae " and chanted by the monks in Mel- 
rose Abbey. 

t Vol. i., pp. 389-404. 



6 (sA History of English 'Romanticism. 

tion which, as he modestly acknowledges, " was more than 
such a truant to the classic page as myself was entitled to 
expect at the source of classic learning." Finally, in his 
last illness, when sent to Rome to recover from the effects 
of a paralytic stroke, his ruling passion was strong in 
death. He examined with eagerness the remains of the 
mediaeval city, but appeared quite indifferent to that older 
Rome which speaks to the classical student. It will be 
remembered that just the contrary of this was true of Ad- 
dison, when he was in Italy a century before.* Scott 
was at no pains to deny or to justify the one-sidedness of 
his culture. But when Erskine remonstrated with him 
for rambling on 

"through brake and maze 
With harpers rude, of barbarous days, " 

and urged him to compose a regular epic on classical 
lines, he good-naturedly but resolutely put aside the ad- 
vice. 

"Nay, Erskine, nay — On the wild hill 
Let the wild heath-bell f flourish still .... 
Though wild as cloud, as stream, as gale, 
Flow forth, flow unrestrained, my tale ! " % 

* Vol. i., pp. 48-49. 

f "Scott was entirely incapable of entering into the spirit 
of any classical scene. He was strictly a Goth and a Scot, 
and his sphere of sensation may be almost exactly limited by 
the growth of heather," — Ruskin, "Modern Painters," vol. 
iii., p. 317. 

X " Marmion " : Introduction to Canto third. In the pref- 
ace to "The Bridal of Triermain, " the poet says : "According 
to the author's idea of Romantic Poetry, as distinguished 
from Epic, the former comprehends a fictitious narrative, 
framed and combined at the pleasure of the writer ; beginning 
and ending as he may judge best ; which neither exacts nor 
refuses the use of supernatural machinery ; which is free 
from the technical rules of the Epi!e. ... In a word, the 
author is absolute master of his country and its inhabitants." 



Walter Scott. 7 

Scott's letters to Erskine, Ellis, Leyden, Ritson, Miss 
Seward, and other literary correspondents are filled with 
discussions of antiquarian questions and the results of 
his favourite reading in old books and manuscripts. He 
communicates his conclusions on the subject of " Arthur 
and Merlin " or on the authorship of the old metrical ro- 
mance of " Sir Tristram." * He has been copying manu- 
scripts in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh. In 1791 
he read papers before the Speculative Society on " The 
Origin of the Feudal System," " The Authenticity of Os- 
sian's Poems," "The Origin of the Scandinavian Mythol- 
ogy." Lockhart describes two note-books in Scott's hand- 
writing, with the date 1792, containing memoranda of 
ancient court records about Walter Scott and his wife, 
Dame Janet Beaton, the " Ladye " of Branksome in the 
"Lay"; extracts from "Guerin de Montglave "; copies 
of "Vegtam's Kvitha" and the "Death-Song of Regner 
Lodbrog," with Gray's English versions; Cnut's verses on 
passing Ely Cathedral; the ancient English "Cuckoo 
Song," and other rubbish of the kind.f When in 1803 
he began to contribute articles to the Edinburgh Review, 
his chosen topics were such as " Amadis of Gaul," Ellis' 

* Scott's ascription of "Sir Tristram" to Thomas the 
Rhymer, or Thomas of Erceldoune, was doubtless a mistake. 
His edition of the romance was printed in 1804. In 1800 he 
had begun a prose tale, "Thomas the Rhymer," a fragment 
of which is given in the preface to the General Edition of 
the Waverley Novels (1829). This old legendary poet and 
prophet, who flourished circa 1280, and was believed to have 
been carried off by the Queen of Faerie into Eildon Hill, fas- 
cinated Scott's imagination strongly. See his version of the 
"True Thomas'" story in the "Minstrelsy, " as also the editions 
of this very beautiful romance in Child's "Ballads," in the 
publications of the E. E. Text So. ; and by Alois Brandl, Ber- 
lin : 1880. 
f See vol. i., p. 390. 



8 t/f History of English '^ofnanticism. 

" Specimens of Ancient English Poetry," Godwin's 
"Chaucer," Sibbald's "Chronicle of Scottish Poetry," 
Evans'" Old Ballads," Todd's " Spenser," "The Life and 
Works of Chatterton," Southey's translation of "The 
Cid," etc. 

Scott's preparation for the work which he had to do 
was more than adequate. His reading along chosen 
lines was probably more extensive and minute than an} 
man's of his generation. The introductions and notes to 
his poems and novels are even overburdened with learn* 
ing. But this, though important, was but the lesser part 
of his advantage. "The old-maidenly genius of anti- 
quarianism " could produce a Strutt * or even perhaps a 
Warton ; but it needed the touch of the creative imagi- 
nation to turn the dead material of knowledge into works 
of art that have delighted millions of readers for a hun- 
dred years in all civilised lands and tongues. 

The key to Scott's romanticism is his intense local 
feeling.f That attachment to place which, in most men, 
is a sort of animal instinct, was with him a passion. To 
set the imagination at work some emotional stimulus is 
required. The angry pride of Byron, Shelley's revolt 
against authority, Keats' almost painfully acute sensitive- 
ness to beauty, supplied the nervous irritation which was 
wanting in Scott's slower, stronger, and heavier tempera- 
ment. The needed impetus came to him from his love of 
country. Byron and Shelley were torn up by the roots 
and flung abroad ; but Scott had struck his roots deep 



* See the General Preface to the Waverley Novels for some 
remarks on " Queenhoo Hall " which Strutt began and Scott 
completed. 

t Cf. vol. i., p. 344. 



Walter Scott. 9 

into native soil. His absorption in the past and rever- 
ence for everything that was old, his conservative prej- 
udices and aristocratic ambitions, all had their source in 
this feeling. Scott's Toryism was of a different spring 
from Wordsworth's and Coleridge's, It was not a reac- 
tion from disappointed radicalism; nor was it the result 
of reasoned conviction. It was inborn and was nursed 
into a sentimental Jacobitism by ancestral traditions and 
by an early prepossession in favour of the Stuarts — a 
Scottish dynasty — reinforced by encounters with men in 
the Highlands who had been out in the '45. It did not 
interfere with a practical loyalty to the reigning house 
and with what seems like a somewhat exaggerated defer- 
ence to George IV. Personally the most modest of men, 
he was proud to trace his descent from "auld Wat of 
Harden " * and to claim kinship with the bold Buccleuch. 
He used to make annual pilgrimages to Harden Tower, 
" the incunabula of his race " ; and " in the earlier part of 
his life," says Lockhart, "he had nearly availed himself 
of his kinsman's permission to fit up the dilapidated /<?<?/ 
for his summer residence." 

Byron wrote : " I twine my hope of being remembered 
in my line with my land's language." But Scott wished 
to associate his name with the land itself. Abbotsford 
was more to him than Newstead could ever have been to 
Byron; although Byron was a peer and inherited his 
domain, while Scott was a commoner and created his. 
Too much has been said in condemnation of Scott's 



*"I am therefore descended from that ancient chieftain 
whose name I have made to ring in many a ditty, and from 
his fair dame, the Flower of Yarrow — no bad genealogy for 
a Border minstrel. " 



lo d/^ History of English Romanticism. 

weakness in this respect; that his highest ambition was 
to become a iaird and found a family; that he was more 
gratified when the King made him a baronet than when 
the public bought his books; that the expenses of Ab- 
botsford and the hospitalities which he extended to all 
comers wasted his time and finally brought about his 
bankruptcy. Leslie Stephen and others have even made 
merry over Scott's Gothic,* comparing his plaster-of- 
Paris 'scutcheons and ceilings in imitation of carved oak 
with the pinchbeck architecture of Strawberry Hill, and 
intimating that the feudalism in his romances was only a 
shade more genuine than the feudalism of "The Castle 
of Otranto." Scott was imprudent; Abbotsford was his 
weakness, but it was no ignoble weakness. If the ideal 
of the life which he proposed to himself there was scarcely 
a heroic one, neither was it vulgar or selfish. The artist 
or the philosopher should perhaps be superior to the am- 
bition of owning land and having " a stake in the coun- 
try," but the ambition is a very human one and has its 
good side. In Scott the desire was more social than 
personal. It was not that title and territory were feathers 
in his cap, but that they bound him more closely to the 
dear soil of Scotland and to the national, historic past. 

The only deep passion in Scott's poetry is patriotism, 
the passion of place. In his metrical romances the rush 
of the narrative and the vivid, picturesque beauty of the 



* " He neither cared for painting nor sculpture, and was to- 
tally incapable of forming a judgment about them. He had 
some confused love of Gothic architecture because it was dark, 
picturesque, old and like nature ; but could not tell the worst 
from the best, and built for himself probably the most incon- 
gruous and ugly pile that gentlemanly modernism ever de- 
vised." — Ruskin, "Modern Painters," vol. iii., p. 271. 



Walter Scott. 1 1 

descriptions are indeed exciting to the imagination; but 
it is only when the chord of national feeling is touched 
that the verse grows lyrical, that the heart is reached, and 
that tears come into the reader's eyes, as they must have 
done into the poet's. A dozen such passages occur at 
once to the memory; the last stand of the Scottish nobles 
around their king at Flodden; the view of Edinburgh — 
"mine own romantic town" — from Blackford Hill: 

"Fitz-Eustace' heart felt closely pent: 
As if to give his rapture vent, 
The spur he to his charger lent, 

And raised his bridle-hand. 
And, making demi-volte in air, 
Cried, ' Where's the coward that would not dare 

To fight for such a land?'" 

and the still more familiar opening of the sixth canto in 
the " Lay " — " Breathes there the man," etc. : 

"O Caledonia ! stern and wild. 
Meet nurse for a poetic child ! 
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood, 
Land of the mountain and the flood. 
Land of my sires ! what mortal hand 
Can e'er untie the filial band 
That knits me to thy rugged strand? " 

In such a mood geography becomes poetry and names 
are music* Scott said to Washington Irving that if he 
did not see the heather at least once a year, he thought 
he would die. 

Lockhart tells how the sound that he loved best of all 
sounds was in his dying ears — the flow of the Tweed over 
its pebbles. 

Significant, therefore, is Scott's treatment of landscape, 
and the difference in this regard between himself and 

* See vol. i., p. 200. 



12 ft^ History of English 'Romanticism. 

his great contemporaries. His friend, Mr. Morritt of 
Rokeby, testifies: "He was but half satisfied with the 
most beautiful scenery when he could not connect it with 
some local legend." Scott had to the full the romantic 
love of mountain and lake, yet "to me," he confesses, 
"the wandering over the field of Bannockburn was the 
source of more exquisite pleasure than gazing upon the 
celebrated landscape from the battlements of Stirling 
Castle. I do not by any means infer that I was dead to 
the feeling of picturesque scenery. . . . But show me an 
old castle or a field of battle and I was at home at once." 
And again: "The love of natural beauty, more especially 
when combined with ancient ruins or remains of our 
fathers' piety* or splendour, became with me an insati- 
able passion." It was not in this sense that high moun- 
tains were a " passion " to Byron, nor yet to Wordsworth. 
In a letter to Miss Seward, Scott wrote of popular poetry: 
"Much of its peculiar charm is indeed, I believe, to be 
attributed solely to its locality. ... In some verses of 
that eccentric but admirable poet Coleridge f he talks of 

'An old rude tale that suited well 
The ruins wild and hoary.' 

I think there are few who have not been in some de- 
gree touched with this local sympathy. Tell a peasant 
an ordinary tale of robbery and murder, and perhaps you 

* The Abbey of Tintern was irrelevant to Wordsworth. — 
Herford, "The Age of Wordsworth," Int., p. xx. 

■)• " Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmo- 
nious, opposites in this; — that every old ruin, hill, river or 
tree called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical 
associations; . . . whereas, for myself . . . I believe I should 
walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more interest 
in it than in any other plain of similar features." — Coleridge, 
"Table Talk," August 4. 1833. 



Walter Scott. 13 

may fail to interest him ; but, to excite his terrors, you 
assure him it happened on the very heath he usually 
crosses, or to a man whose family he has known, and you 
rarely meet such a mere image of humanity as remains 
entirely unmoved. I suspect it is pretty much the same 
with myself." 

Scott liked to feel solid ground of history, or at least \i 
of legend, under his feet. He connected his wildest ' 
tales, like "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of St. John," with 
definite names and places. This Antaeus of romance lost 
strength, as soon as he was lifted above the earth. With 
Coleridge it was just the contrary. The moment his 
moonlit, vapory enchantments touched ground, the con- 
tact " precipitated the whole solution." In 1813 Scott 
had printed " The Bridal of Triermain " anonymously, 
with a preface designed to mislead the public; having 
contrived, by way of a joke, to fasten the authorship of 
the piece upon Erskine. This poem is as pure fantasy 
as Tennyson's "Day Dream," and tells the story of a 
knight who, in obedience to a vision and the instructions 
of an ancient sage " sprung from Druid sires," enters an 
enchanted castle and frees the Princess Gyneth, a natural 
daughter of King Arthur, from the spell that has bound 
her for five hundred years. But true to his instinct, the 
poet lays his scene not in vacuo, but near his own beloved 
borderland. He found, in Burns' "Antiquities of West- 
moreland and Cumberland" mention of a line of Rolands 
de Vaux, lords of Triermain, a fief of the barony of Gils- 
land; and this furnished him a name for his hero. He 
found in Hutchinson's " Excursion to the Lakes " the 
description of a cluster of rocks in the Vale of St. John's, 
which looked, at a distance, like a Gothic castle; this 



14 c/^ History of English Romanticism. 

supplied him with a hint for the whole adventure. Mean- 
while Coleridge had been living in the Lake Country. 
The wheels of his " Christabel " had got hopelessly 
mired, and he now borrowed a horse from Sir Walter and 
hitched it to his own wagon. He took over Sir Roland 
de Vaux of Triermain and made him the putative father 
of his mysterious Geraldine, although, in compliance 
with Scott's romance, the embassy that goes over the 
mountains to Sir Roland's castle can find no trace of it. 
In Part I. Sir Leoline's own castle stood nowhere in 
particular. In Part II. it is transferred to Cumberland, 
a mistake in art almost as grave as if the Ancient Mar- 
iner had brought his ship to port at Liverpool. 

Wordsworth visited the "great Minstrel of the Border" 
at Abbotsford in 183 1, shortly before Scott set out for 
Naples, and the two poets went in company to the ruins 
of Newark Castle. It is characteristic that in " Yarrow 
Revisited," which commemorates the incident, the Bard 
of Rydal should think it necessary to offer an apology 
for his distinguished host's habit of romanticising 
nature — that nature which Wordsworth, romantic neither 
in temper nor choice of subject, treated after so dif- 
ferent a fashion, 

"Nor deem that localised Romance 

Plays false with our affections ; 
Unsanctifies our tears — made sport 

For fanciful dejections : 
Ah no ! the visions of the past 

Sustain the heart in feeling 
Life as she is — our changeful Life, 

With friends and kindred dealing," 

The apology, after all, is only half-hearted. For while 
Wordsworth esteemed Scott highly and was careful to 



Walter Scott. 15 

speak publicly of his work with a qualified respect, it is 
well known that, in private, he set little value upon it, 
and once somewhat petulantly declared that all Scott's 
poetry was not worth sixpence. He wrote to Scott, of 
"Marmion": " I think your end has been attained. That 
it is not the end which I should wish you to propose to 
yourself, you will be aware." He had visited Scott at 
Lasswade as early as 1803, and in recording his impres- 
sions notes that "his conversation was full of anecdote 
and averse from disquisition." The minstrel was a 
racotiteur and lived in the past; the bard was a moralist 
and lived in the present. 

There are several poems of Wordsworth's and Scott's 
touching upon common ground which serve to contrast 
their methods sharply and to illustrate in a striking way 
the precise character of Scott's romanticism. " Helvel- 
lyn " and "Fidelity" were written independently and 
celebrate the same incident. In 1805 a young man lost 
his way on the Cumberland mountains and perished of 
exposure. Three months afterwards his body was found, 
his faithful dog still watching beside it. Scott was a 
lover of dogs — loved them warmly, individually; so to 
speak, personally; and all dogs instinctively loved Scott.* 

Wordsworth had a sort of tepid, theoretical benevo- 
lence towards the animal creation in general. Yet as 
between the two poets, the advantage in depth of feeling 



* See the delightful anecdote preserved by Carlyle about the 
little Blenheim cocker who hated the "genus acrid-quack" 
and formed an immediate attachment to Sir Walter. Words- 
worth was far from being an acrid quack, or even a solemn 
prig — another genus hated of dogs — but there was something 
a little unsympathetic in his personality. The dalesmen 
liked poor Hartley Coleridge better. 



1 6 <iA History of English 'T{omanticism. 

is, as usual, with Wordsworth. Both render, with per- 
haps equal power, though in characteristically different 
ways, the impression of the austere and desolate grandeur 
of the mountain scenery. But the thought to which 
Wordsworth leads up is the mysterious divineness of in- 
stinct 

"... that strength of feeling, great 
Above all human estimate :" — 

while Scott conducts his story to the reflection that Na- 
ture has given the dead man a more stately funeral than 
the Church could have given, a comparison seemingly 
dragged in for the sake of a stanzaful of his favourite 
Gothic imagery. 

"When a Prince to the fate of the Peasant has yielded. 
The tapestry waves dark round the dim-lighted hall ; 
With 'scutcheons of silver the coffin is shielded, 

And pages stand mute by the canopied pall : 
Through the courts at deep midnight the torches are gleam- 
ing. 
In the proudly arched chapel the banners are beammg, 
Far adown the long aisle sacred music is streaming, 
Lamenting a chief of the people should fall." 

Wordsworth and Landor, who seldom agreed, agreed 
that Scott's most imaginative line was the verse in 
" Helvellyn " : 

"When the wind waved his garment how oft didst thou 
start ! " 

In several of his poems Wordsworth handled legendary 
subjects, and it is most instructive here to notice his 
avoidance of the romantic note, and to imagine how Scott 
would have managed the same material. In the prefa- 
tory note to "The White Doe of Rylstone," Wordsworth 
himself pointed out the difference. " The subject being 



Walter Scott. 17 

taken from feudal times has led to its being compared to 
some of Sir Walter Scott's poems that belong to the same 
age and state of society. The comparison is inconsid- 
erate. Sir Walter pursued the customary and very natu- 
ral course of conducting an action, presenting various 
turns of fortune, to some outstanding point on which the 
mind might rest as a termination or catastrophe. The 
course I attempted to pursue is entirely different. Every- 
thing that is attempted by the principal personages in 
' The White Doe ' fails, so far as its object is external 
and substantial. So far as it is moral and spiritual it 
succeeds." 

This poem is founded upon "The Rising in the 
North," a ballad given in the *' Reliques," which re- 
counts the insurrection of the Earls of Northumberland 
and Westmoreland against Elizabeth in 1569. Richard 
Norton of Rylstone, with seven stalwart sons, joined in 
the rising, carrying a banner embroidered with a red 
cross and the five wounds of Christ. The story bristled 
with opportunities for the display of feudal pomp, and it 
is obvious upon what points in the action Scott would 
have laid the emphasis; the muster of the tenantry of the 
great northern Catholic houses of Percy and Neville; the 
high mass celebrated by the insurgents in Durham Cathe- 
dral; themarchof the Nortonsto Brancepeth; the eleven 
days' siege of Barden Tower; the capture and execution 
of Marmaduke and Ambrose; and — by way of episode — 
the Battle of Neville's Cross in 1346.* But in conform- 
ity to the principle announced in the preface to the 

* Scott could scarcely have forborne to introduce the figure 
of the Queen of Scots, to insure whose marriage with Norfolk 
was one of the objects of the rising. 



i8 aA History of English ^{omauticisni. 

"Lyrical Ballads" — that the feeling should give impor- 
tance to the incidents and situation, not the incidents and 
situation to the feeling — Wordsworth treats all this out- 
ward action as merely preparatory to the true purpose of 
his poem, a study of the discipline of sorrow, of ruin and 
bereavement patiently endured by the Lady Emily, the 
only daughter and survivor of the Norton house. 

"Action is transitory — a step, a blow. . . . 
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, 
And has the nature of intinity. 

Yet through that darkness (infinite though it seem 
And irrenioveable) gracious openings lie. . . . 
Even to the t'ountain-head of peace divine." 

With the story of the Nortons the poet connects a local 
tradition which he found in Whitaker's " History of the 
Deanery of Craven " ; of a white doe which haunted the 
churchyard of Bolton Priory, Between this gentle crea- 
ture and the forlorn Lady of Rylstone he establishes the 
mysterious and soothing sympathy which he was always 
fond of imagining between the soul of man and the things 
of nature.* 

Or take again the '' Song at the Feast of Brougham 
Castle," an incident in the Wars of the Roses. Lord 
Clifford, who had been hidden away in infancy from the 
vengeance of the Yorkists and reared as a shepherd, is 
restored to the estates and honours of his ancestors. 
High in the festal hall the impassioned minstrel strikes 
his harp and sings the triumph of Lancaster, urging the 
shepherd lord to emulate the warlike prowess of his fore- 
fathers. 

* For a full review of "The White Doe " the reader should 
consult Principal Shairp's "Aspects of Poetry," i88i. 



Walter Scott. 19 

"Armour rustinj? in his halls 
On the blood of Clifford calls ; 
'Quell the Scot,' exclaims the Lance — 
Bear me to the heart of France 
Is the longing of the Shield." 

Thus far the minstrel, and he has Sir Walter with 
him; for this is evidently the part of the poem that he 
liked and remembered, when he noted in his journal that 
" Wordsworth could be popular * if he would — witness 
the ' Feast at Brougham Castle ' — ' Song of the Cliffords,' 
I think, is the name." But the exultant strain ceases 
and the poet himself speaks, and with the transition in 
feeling comes a change in the verse; the minstrel's song 
was in the octosyllabic couplet associated with metrical 
romance. But this Clifford was no fighter — none of 
Scott's heroes. Nature had educated him. 

"In him the savage virtue of the Race " was dead. 

"Love had he found in huts where poor men lie ; 
His daily teachers had been woods and rills. 
The silence that is in the starry sky. 
The sleep that is among the lonely hills." 

Once more, consider the pronounced difference in sen- 
timent between the description of the chase in " Hart- 
leap Well " and the opening passage of "The Lady of 
the Lake " : 

"The stag at eve had drunk his fill. 
Where danced the moon on Monan's rill," etc.f 

* Scott averred that Wordsworth offended public taste on 
system. 

fThis is incomparable, not only as a masterpiece of ro- 
mantic narrative, but for the spirited and natural device by 
which the hero is conducted to his adventure. R. L. Steven- 
son and other critics have been rather hard upon Scott's de- 
fects as an artist. He was indeed no stylist : least of all a 
precieux. There are no close-set mosaics in his somewhat 



20 qA History of English '^omariticism. 

Scott was a keen sportsman, and his sympathy was with 
the hunter.* Wordsworth's, of course, was with the 
quarry. The knight in his poem — who bears not unsug- 
gestivelythe name of "Sir Walter" — has outstripped all 
his companions, like Fitz James, and is the only one in 
at the death. To commemorate his triumph he frames a 
basin for the spring whose waters were stirred by his 
victim's dying breath; he plants three stone pillars to 
mark the creature's hoof-prints in its marvellous leap 
from the mountain to the springside; and he builds a 
pleasure house and an arbour where he comes with his 
paramour to make merry in the summer days. But Na- 
ture sets her seal of condemnation upon the cruelty and 
vainglory of man. "The spot is curst"; no flowers or 
grass will grow there; no beast will drink of the fountain. 
Part I. tells the story without enthusiasm but without 
comment. Part II. draws the lesson 

"Never to blend our pleasure or our pride 
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels." 

The song of Wordsworth's " Solitary Reaper" derives 
a pensive sorrow from " old, unhappy, far-off things and 
battles long ago." But to Scott the battle is not far off, 
but a vivid and present reality. When he visited the 

slip-shod prose, and he did not seek for the right word "with 
moroseness," like Landor. But, in his large fashion, he was 
skilful iu inventing impressive effects. Another instance is 
the solitary trumpet that breathed its "note of defiance" in 
the lists of Ashby-de-la-Zouch. which has the genuine melo- 
dramatic thrill — like the horn of Hernani or the bell that tolls 
in "Venice Preserved." 

* See the "Hunting Song" in his continuation of "Queen- 
hoo Hall "— 

"Waken, lords and ladies gay, 
On the mountain dawns the day." 



Walter Scott. 2 1 

Trosachs glen, his thought painly was, " What a place for 
a fight! " And when James looks down on Loch Katrine 
his first reflection is, "What a scene were here . . . 

"For princely pomp or churchman's pride ! 
On this bold brow a lordly tower ; 
In that soft vale a lady's bower ; 
On yonder meadow, far away. 
The turrets of a cloister grej'," etc. 

The most romantic scene was not romantic enough for 
Scott till his imagination had peopled it with the life of 
a vanished age. 

The literary forms which Scott made peculiarly his 
own, and in which the greater part of his creative work 
was done, are three: the popular ballad, the metrical 
romance, and the historical novel in prose. His point 
of departure was the ballad.* The material amassed in 
his Liddesdale "raids" — begun in 1792 and continued 
for seven successive years — was given to the world in the 
" Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border " (Vols. I. and II. in 
1802; Vol. III. in 1803), a collection of ballads histori- 
cal, legendary, and romantic, with an abundant apparatus 
in the way of notes and introductions, illustrating the 
history, antiquities, manners, traditions, and superstitions 
of the Borderers. Forty-three of the ballads in the 
"Minstrelsy" had never been printed before; and of the 
remainder the editor gave superior versions, choosing 
with sureness of taste the best among variant readings, 
and with a more intimate knowledge of local ways and 
language than any previous ballad-fancier had com- 
manded. He handled his texts more faithfully than 
Percy, rarely substituting lines of his own. " From 

*See vol. i., pp. 277 and 390. 



22 c/^ History of English 'Romanticism. 

among a hundred corruptions," says Lockhart, *' he seized, 
with instinctive tact, the primitive diction and imagery, 
and produced strains in which the unbroken energy of 
half-civilised ages, their stern and deep passions, their 
daring adventures and cruel tragedies, and even their 
rude wild humour are reflected with almost the brightness 
of a Homeric mirror." 

In the second volume of the "Minstrelsy" were in- 
cluded what Scott calls his " first serious attempts in 
verse," viz., "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of St. John," 
which had been already printed in Lewis' "Tales of 
Wonder," Both pieces are purely romantic, with a strong 
tincture of the supernatural ; but the first — Scott himself 
draws the distinction — is a " legendary poem," and the 
second alone a proper " ballad." " Glenfinlas," * founded 
on a Gaelic legend, tells how a Highland chieftain while 
hunting in Perthshire, near the scene of "The Lady of the 
Lake," is lured from his bothie at night and torn to 
pieces by evil spirits. There is no attempt here to pre- 
serve the language of popular poetry; stanzas abound in 
a diction of which the following is a fair example: 

"Long have I sought sweet Mary's heart, 
And dropp'd the tear and heaved the sigh : 
But vain the lover's wily art 
Beneath a sister's watchful eye." 

*' The Eve of St, John " employs common ballad stuff, the 
visit of a murdered lover's ghost to his lady's bedside — 

"At the lone midnight hour, when bad spirits have power" — 

but the poet, as usual, anchors his weird nightmares 
firmly to real names and times and places, Dryburgh 

* The Glen of the Green Women. 



Walter Scott. 23 

Abbey, the black rood of Melrose, the Eildon-tree, the 
bold Buccleuch, and the Battle of Ancram Moor (1545). 
The exact scene of the tragedy is Smailholme Tower, the 
ruined keep on the crags above his grandfather's farm 
at Sandynowe, which left such an indelible impression 
on Scott's childish imagination.* "The Eve" is in bal- 
lad style and verse : 

"Thou liest, thou liest, thou little foot page, 
Loud dost thou lie to me ! 

For that knight is cold, and low laid in the mould, 
All under the Eildon tree." 

In his " Essay on the Imitation of Popular Poetry," 
Scott showed that he understood the theory of ballad 
composition. When he took pains, he could catch the 
very manner as well as the spirit of ancient minstrelsy; 
but if his work is examined under the microscope it is 
easy to detect flaws. The technique of the Pre-Raphael- 
ites and other modern balladists, like Rossetti and Mor- 
ris, is frequently finer; they reproduce more scrupulously 
the formal characteristics of popular poetry : the burden, 

* "And still I thought that shattered tower 

The mightiest work of human power; 

And marvelled as the aged hind 

With some strange tale bewitched my mind, 

Of foragers who, with headlong force, 

Down from that strength had spurred their horse, 

Their Southern rapine to renew. 

Far in the distant Cheviots blue ; 

And, home returning, filled the hall 

With revel, wassail-rout and brawl." — "Marmion." In- 
troduction to Canto Third. See Lockhart for a de- 
scription of the view from Smailholme, apropos 
of the stanza in "The Eve of St. John" : 

"That lady sat in mournful mood ; 
Looked over hill and vale : 
O'ver Tweed's fair flood, and Mertoun's wood, 
And all down Teviot dale." 



24 e^ History of English 'Romanticism. 

the sing-song repetitions, the quaint turns of phrase, the 
imperfect rimes, the innocent, childlike air of the me- 
digeval tale-tellers. Scott's vocabulary is not consist- 
ently archaic, and he was not always careful to avoid 
locutions out of keeping with the style of Volkspoesie* 
He was by no means a rebel against eighteenth-century 
usages.f In his prose he is capable of speaking of a lady 
as an "elegant female." In his poetry he will begin a 
ballad thus: 

"The Pope he was saying the high, high mass 
All on St. Peter's day" ; 

and then a little later fall into this kind of thing: 

"There the rapt poet's step may rove, 
And yield the muse the day : 
There Beauty, led by timid Love, 
May shun the tell-tale ray," etc. % 

It is possible to name single pieces like "The Ancient 
Mariner," and "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and "Rose- 
Mary," of a rarer imaginative quality and a more perfect 
workmanship than Scott often attains; yet upon the whole 
and in the mass, no modern balladry matches the success 
of his. The Pre-Raphaelites were deliberate artists, con- 
sciously reproducing an extinct literary form; but Scott 
had lived himself back into the social conditions out of 
which ballad poetry was born. His best pieces of this 
class do not strike us as imitations but as original, spon- 

* See vol. i.. pp. 394-395- 

f Scott's verse "is touched both with the facile redundance 
of the medifEval romances in which he was steeped, and with 
the meretricious phraseology of the later eighteenth century, 
which he was too genuine a literary Torj- wholly to put aside." 
— "The Age of Wordsworth," C. H. Herford, London. 1897. 

I "The Gray Brother" in vol. iii. of the "Minstrelsy." 



Walter Scott. 25 

taneous, and thoroughly alive. Such are, to particularise 
but a few, "Jock o' Hazeldean," " Cadyow Castle," on 
the assassination of the Regent Murray; "The Reiver's 
Wedding," a fragment preserved in Lockhart's " Life " ; 
"Elspeth's Ballad" ("The Red Harlow") in "The An- 
tiquary"; Madge Wildfire's songs in "The Heart of 
Mid-Lothian," and David Gellatley's in "Waverley"; 
besides the other scraps and snatches of minstrelsy too 
numerous for mention, sown through the novels and 
longer poems. For in spite of detraction, Walter Scott 
remains one of the foremost British lyrists. In Mr. Pal- 
grave's " Treasury " he is represented by a larger number 
of selections than either Milton, Byron, Burns, Campbell, 
Keats, or Herrick ; making an easy fourth to Wordsworth, 
Shakspere, and Shelley. And in marked contrast with 
Shelley especially, it is observable of Scott's contribu- 
tions to this anthology that they are not the utterance of 
the poet's personal emotion; they are coronachs, pibrochs, 
gathering songs, narrative ballads, and the like — objec- 
tive, dramatic lyrics touched always with the light of his- 
tory or legend. 

The step from ballad to ballad-epic is an easy one, and 
it was by a natural evolution that the one passed into the 
other in Scott's hands. " The Lay of the Last Minstrel " 
(1805) was begun as a ballad on the local tradition of 
Gilpin Horner and at the request of the Countess of Dal- 
keith, who told Scott the story. But his imagination was 
so full that the poem soon overflowed its limits and ex- 
panded into a romance illustrative of the ancient manners 
of the Border. The pranks of the goblin page run in 
and out through the web of the tale, a slender and some- 
what inconsequential thread of diablerie. Byron had his 



26 e/^ History of English 'Romanticism. 

laugh at it in " English Bards and Scotch Reviewers " ; * 
and in a footnote on the passage, he adds: "Never was 
any plan so incongruous and absurd as the groundwork 
of this production." The criticism was not altogether 
undeserved; for the "Lay" is a typical example of ro- 
mantic, as distinguished from classic, art both in its 
strength and in its weakness; brilliant in passages, faulty 
in architechtonic, and uneven in execution. Its super- 
natural machinery — Byron said that it had more "gram- 
arye " than grammar — is not impressive, if due exception 
be made of the opening of Michael Scott's tomb in Canto 
Second. 

When the " Minstrelsy " was published, it was remarked 
that it " contained the elements of a hundred historical 
romances." It was from such elements that Scott built 
up the structure of his poem about the nucleus which the 
Countess of Dalkeith had given him. He was less con- 
cerned, as he acknowledged, to tell a coherent story than 
to paint a picture of the scenery and the old warlike, life 
of the Border; that tableau large de la vie which the 
French romanticists afterwards professed to be the aim 
of their novels and dramas. The feud of the Scotts and 
Carrs furnished him with a historic background; with 
this he enwove a love story of the Romeo and Juliet pat- 
tern. He rebuilt Melrose Abbey, and showed it by moon- 
light; set Lords Dacre and Howard marching on a 
Warden-raid, and roused the border clans to meet them; 
threw out dramatic character sketches of " stark moss- 



* "And goblin brats, of Gilpin Horner's brood, 
Decoy young border-nobles through the wood. 
And skip at every step. Lord knows how high. 
And frighten foolish babes, the Lord knows why." 



Walter Scott. 27 

riding Scots " like Wat Tinlinn and William of Deloraine ; 
and finally enclosed the whole in a cadre most happily 
invented, the venerable, pathetic figure of the old min- 
strel who tells the tale to the Duchess of Monmouth at 
Newark Castle. 

• The love story is perhaps the weakest part of the poem. 
Henry Cranstoun and Margaret of Branksome are noth- 
ing but lay figures. Scott is always a little nervous when 
the lover and the lady are left alone together. ' The fair 
dames in the audience expect a tender scene, but the 
harper pleads his age, by way of apology, gets the busi- 
ness over as decently as may be, and hastens on with comic 
precipitation to the fighting, which he thoroughly enjoys.* 
The " light-horseman stanza" which Scott employed 
in his longer poems was caught from the recitation by 
Sir John Stoddart of a portion of Coleridge's " Christabel," 
then still in manuscript. The norm of the verse was the 
eight-syllabled riming couplet used in most of the Eng- 
lish metrical romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth 
centuries. It is a form of verse which moves more swiftly 
than blank verse or the heroic couplet, and is perhaps 
better suited for romantic poetry. f But it is liable to 
grow monotonous in a long poem, and Coleridge's un- 
surpassed skill as a metrist was exerted to give it free- 
dom, richness, and variety by the introduction of ana- 
psestic lines and alternate rimes and triplets, breaking 
up the couplets into a series of irregular stanzas. 

* "Now leave we Margaret and her knight 
To tell you of the approaching fight." 

—Canto Fifth, xiii. 
f Landor says oddly of Warton that he "had lost his ear by 
laying it down on low swampy places, on ballads and son- 
nets." 



28 iA History of English l^omanticism. 

With " The Lay of the Last Minstrel " romanticism 
came of age and entered on its career of triumph. One 
wishes that Collins and Tom Warton might have lived 
to hail it as the light, at last, towards which they had 
struggled through the cold obstruction of the eighteenth 
century. One fancies Dr. Johnson's disgust over this 
new Scotch monstrosity, which had every quality that he 
disliked except blank verse; or Gray's delight in it, tem- 
pered by a critical disapproval of its loose construction 
and irregularity. Scott's romances in prose and verse 
are still so universally known as to make any review of 
them here individually an impertinence. Their impact 
on contemporary Europe was instantaneous and wide- 
spread. There is no record elsewhere in literary history 
of such success. Their immense sales, the innumerable 
editions and translations and imitations of them, are mat- 
ters of familiar knowledge. Poem followed poem, and 
novel, novel in swift and seemingly exhaustless succes- 
sion, and each was awaited by the public with unabated 
expectancy. Here once more was a poet who could tell 
the world a story that it wanted to hear ; a poet 

"Such as it had 
In the ages glad, 
Long ago." 

The Homeric* quality which criticism has attributed 
or denied to these poems is really there. The difference, 
the inferiority is obvious of course. They are not in the 
grand style; they are epic on a lower plane, ballad-epic, 
bastard-epic perhaps, but they are epic. No English verse 

* Does not the quarrel of Richard and Philip in "The Tal- 
isman " remind one irresistibly of Achilles and Agamemnon in 
the "Iliad"? 



Walter Scoit. 29 

narrative except Chaucer's ranks, as a whole, above 
Scott's. Chaucer's disciple, William Morris, has an 
equal flow and continuity, and keeps a more even level 
of style; but his story-telling is languid compared with 
Scott's. The latter is greater in the dynamic than in the 
static department — in scenes of rapid action and keen 
excitement. His show passages are such as the fight in 
the Trosachs, Flodden Field, William of Deloraine's 
ride to Melrose, the trial of Constance, the muster on the 
Borough Moor, Marmion's defiance to Douglas, the com- 
bat of James and Roderick Dhu, the summons of the fiery 
cross, and the kindling of the need-fires — those romantic 
equivalents of the Xa^7ca8-q(p6poi in the " Agamemnon." 

In the series of long poems which followed the "Lay," 
Scott deserted the Border and brought in new subjects of 
romantic interest, the traditions of Flodden and Bannock- 
burn, the manners of the Gaelic clansmen, and the wild 
scenery of the Perthshire Highlands, the life of the 
Western Islands, and the rugged coasts of Argyle. Only 
two of these tales are concerned with the Middle Ages, 
strictly speaking: "The Lord of the Isles" (1813), in 
which the action begins in 1307; and "Harold the 
Dauntless" (1817), in which the period is the time of the 
Danish settlements in Northumbria. " Rokeby " (1812) 
is concerned with the Civil War. The scene is laid in 
Yorkshire. " Marmion " (1808), and "The Lady of the 
Lake" (1810), like "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," had 
to do with the sixteenth century, but the poet imported 
mediaeval elements into all of these by the frankest an- 
achronisms. He restored St. Hilda's Abbey and the 
monastery at Lindisfarne, which had been in ruins for 
centuries, and peopled them again with monks and nuns. 



30 <^ History of English Romanticism. 

He revived in De Wilton the figure of the palmer and 
the ancient custom of pilgrimage to Palestine. And he 
transferred "the wondrous wizard, Michael Scott" from 
the thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth. But, 
indeed, the state of society in Scotland might be de- 
scribed as mediaeval as late as the middle of the sixteenth 
century. It was still feudal, and in great part Catholic. 
Particularly in the turbulent Borderland, a rude spirit of 
chivalry and a passion for wild adventure lingered among 
the Eliots, Armstrongs, Kerrs, Rutherfords, Homes, John- 
stons, and other marauding clans, who acknowledged no 
law but march law, and held slack allegiance to " the 
King of Lothian and Fife." Every owner of a half-ruin- 
ous " peel " or border keep had a band of retainers within 
call, like the nine-and-twenty knights of fame who hung 
their shields in Branksome Hall; and he could summon 
them at short notice, for a raid upon the English or a 
foray against some neighbouring proprietor with whom 
he was at feud. 

But the literary form under which Scott made the deep- 
est impression upon the consciousness of his own genera- 
tion and influenced most permanently the future literature 
of Europe, was prose fiction. As the creator of the his- 
torical novel and the ancestor of Kingsley, Ainsworth, 
Bulwer, and G. P. R. James; of Manzoni, Freytag, Hugo, 
Merimee, Dumas, Alexis Tolstoi, and a host of others, 
at home and abroad, his example is potent yet. English 
fiction is directly or indirectly in his debt for "Romola," 
" Hypatia," " Henry Esmond," and "The Cloister and 
the Hearth." In several countries the historical novel 
had been trying for centuries to get itself born, but all its 
attempts had been abortive. "Waverley" is not only 



Walter Scott 31 

vastly superior to "Thaddeus of Warsaw" (1803) and 
"The Scottish Chiefs" (1809) ; it is something quite dif- 
ferent in kind.* The Waverley Novels, twenty-nine in 
number, appeared in the years 18 14-31. The earlier 
numbers of the series, "Waverley," "Guy Mannering," 
"The Antiquary," "Old Mortality," " The Black Dwarf," 
"Rob Roy," "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," "The Bride 
of Lammermoor," and " A Legend of Montrose," were 
Scotch romances of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
turies. In"Ivanhoe" (18 19) the author went to England 
for his scene, and back to the twelfth century for his </ 
period. Thenceforth he ranged over a wide region in 
time and space; Elizabethan England (" Kenilworth"), 
the France and Switzerland of Louis XL and Charles 
the Bold (" Quentin Durward " and " Anne of Geier- 
stein "), Constantinople and Syria ("Count Robert of 
Paris," "The Betrothed," and "The Talisman") in the 
age of the Crusades, The fortunes of the Stuarts, in- 
terested him specially and engaged him in "Wood- 
stock," "The Fortunes of Nigel," "The Monastery," and 
its sequel, "The Abbot." He seems to have had, in the 
words of Mr. R, H. Hutton, "something very like per- 
sonal experience of a few centuries." 

Scott's formula for the construction of a historical 
romance was original with himself, and it has been fol- 
lowed by all his successors. His story is fictitious, his 
hero imaginary. Richard I. is not the hero of " Ivan- 
hoe," nor Louis XL of " Quentin Durward." Shak- 
spere dramatised history; Scott romanticised it. Still 

*For a review of English historical fiction before Scott, con- 
sult Professor Cross' "Development of the English Novel," 
pp. 110-114. 



32 <^ History of E-nglisb liomanticism. 

it is history; the private story is swept into the stream 
of large public events; the fate of the lover or the ad- 
venturer is involved with battles and diplomacies, with 
the rise and fall of kings, dynasties, political parties, 
nations. Stevenson says, comparing Fielding with Scott, 
that " in the work of the latter ... we become suddenly 
conscious of the background. ... It is curious enough 
to think that 'Tom Jones' is laid in the year '45, and 
that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a 
troop of soldiers in his hero's way." * And it is this 
background which is, after all, the important thing in 
Scott — the leading impression; the broad canvas, the 
swarm of life, the spirit of the age, the reconstitution of 
an extinct society. This he was able to give with seem- 
ing ease and without any appearance of " cram." Chron- 
icle matter does not lie about in lumps on the surface of 
his romance, but is decently buried away in the notes. 
In his comments on " Queenhoo Hall " he adverts to the 
danger of a pedantic method; and in his "Journal" 
(October i8th, 1826) he writes as follows of his own nu- 
merous imitators: "They have to read old books and 
consult antiquarian collections, to get their knowledge. 
I write because I have long since read such works and 
possess, thanks to a strong memory, the information which 
they have to seek for. This leads to a dragging in his- 
torical details by head and shoulders, so that the interest 
of the main piece is lost in minute description of events 
which do not affect its progress." 

Of late the recrudescence of the historical novel has 
revived the discussion as to the value of the genre. It 

* "Familiar Studies of Men and Books," by R. L. Steven- 
son. Article, "Victor Hugo's Romances." 



Walter Scott. 33 

may be readily admitted that Scott's best work is realis- 
tic, and is to be looked for in such novels as " The An- 
tiquary," " Old Mortality," " The Heart of Mid-Lothian," 
and in characters like Andrew Fairservice, Bailie Nicol 
Jarvie, Dandie Dinmont, Dugald Dalgetty, Jeanie Deans, 
Edie Ochiltrie, which brought into play his knowledge 
of men, his humour, observation of life, and insight into 
Scotch human nature. Scott knew these people; he had 
to divine James I., Louis XL, and Mary Stuart. The 
historical novel is a tour deforce. Exactly how knights- 
templars, burgomasters, friars, Saracens, and Robin 
Hood archers talked and acted in the twelfth century, we 
cannot know. But it is just because they are strange to 
our experience that they are dear to our imagination. 
The justification of romance is its unfamiliarity — 
*' strangeness added to beauty " — " the pleasure of sur- 
prise" as distinguished from "the pleasure of recogni- 
tion." Again and again realism returns to the charge 
and demands of art that it give us the present and the 
actual; and again and again the imagination eludes the 
demand and makes an ideal world for itself in the blue 
distance. 

Two favourite arts, or artifices, of all romantic schools, 
are " local colour " and " the picturesque." " Vers I'an 
de grace 1827," writes Prosper Merimee, " j'etais roman- 
iiqiie. Nous disions aux classiqties ; vos Grecs ne sont 
pas des Grecs, vos Romains ne sont pas des Romains; 
vous ne savez pas donner a vos compositions la couleur 
locale. Point de salut sans la couleur locale.^'' * 

*"Le Roman Historique a I'Epoque Romantique." Essai 
sur r influence de Walter Scott. Par Louis Maigron. Paris 
(Hachette), 1898, p. 331, note. And ibid., p. 330: "Au 



34 <^ History of English Romanticism. 

As to the picturesque — a word that connotes, in its 
critical uses, some quality in the objects of sense which 
strikes us as at once novel, and characteristic in its nov- 
elty — while by no means the highest of literary arts, it is 
a perfectly legitimate one.* Cre^y is not, at bottom, a 
more interesting battle thai? Gettysburg because it was 

lieu que les classiques s'eflforgaient tou jours, a travers las 
modifications que les pays, les temps et les circonstances 
peuvent apporter aux sentiments et aux passions des hommes, 
d'atteindre a ce que ces passions et ces sentiments conservent 
de permanent, d'immuable et d'eternel, c'est au contraire a 
r expression de I'accidentel et du relatif que les novateurs de- 
vaient les efforts de leur art. Plus simplement, a la place de 
la verite humaine, ils devaient mettre la verite locale." Pro- 
fessor Herford says that what Scott "has in common with the 
Romantic temper is simply the feeling for the picturesque, for 
colour, for contrast." "Age of Wordsworth," p. 121. 

* De Quincey da^WQ?, picturesgne as "the characteristic 
pushed into a sensible excess." The word began to excite 
discussion in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. See 
vol. i., p. 185, for Gilpin's "Observations on Picturesque 
Beauty. " See also Uvedale Price, " Essays on the Picturesque 
as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful," three 
vols., 1794-96. Price finds the character of the picturesque to 
consist in roughness, irregularity, intricacy, and sudden vari- 
ation. Gothic buildings are more picturesque than Grecian, 
and a ruin than an entire building. Hovels, cottages, mills, 
interiors of old barns are picturesque. " In mills particularly, 
such is the extreme intricacy of the wheels and the wood 
work : such is the singular variety of forms and of lights and 
shadows, of mosses and weather stains from the constant 
moisture, of plants springing from the rough joints of the 
stones — that, even without the addition of water, an old mill 
has the greatest charm for a painter" (i., 55). He mentions, 
as a striking example of picturesque beauty, a hollow lane or 
by-road with broken banks, thickets, old neglected pollards, 
fantastic roots bared by the winter torrents, tangled trailers 
and wild plants, and infinite variety of tints and shades (i., 
23-29) . He denounces the improvements of Capability Brown 
(see "Romanticism," vol. i., p. 124) : especially the clump, 
the belt and regular serpentine walks with smooth turf edges, 
the made water with uniformly sloping banks — all as insip- 
idly formal, in their way, as the old Italian gardens which 
Brown's landscapes displaced. 



Walter Scott. 35 

fought with bows and arrows, but it is more picturesque 
to the modern imagination just for that reason. Why 
else do the idiots in "MacArthur's Hymn" complain 
that "steam spoils romance at sea"? Why did Ruskin 
lament when the little square at the foot of Giotto's Tower 
in Florence was made a stand for hackney coaches? 
Why did our countryman Halleck at Alnwick Towers 
resent the fact that " the Percy deals in salt and hides, 
the Douglas sells red herring " ? And why does the pic- 
turesque tourist, in general, object to the substitution of 
naphtha launches for gondolas on the Venetian canals? 
Perhaps because the more machinery is interposed be- 
tween man and the thing he works on, the more imper- 
sonal becomes his relation to nature. 

Carlyle, in his somewhat grudging estimate of Scott, 
declares that "much of the interest of these novels results 
from contrasts of costume. The phraseology, fashion of 
arms, of dress, of life belonging to one age is brought 
suddenly with singular vividness before the eyes of an- 
other. A great effect this; yet by the very nature of it an 
altogether temporary one. Consider, brethren, shall not 
we too one day be antiques and grow to have as quaint a 
costume as the rest? . . . Not by slashed breeches, 
steeple hats, buff belts, or antiquated speech can romance- 
heroes continue to interest us; but simply and solely, in 
the long run, by being men. Buff belts and all manner 
of jerkins and costumes are transitory; man alone is 
perennial." * Carlyle's dissatisfaction with Scott arises 
from the fact that he was not a missionary nor a transcen- 
dental philosopher, but simply a teller of stories. Heine 
was not troubled in the same way, but he made the iden- 
* " Essay on Walter Scott." 



36 zA History of English ^Romanticism. 

tical criticism. *' Like the works of Walter Scott, so also 
do Fouque's romances of chivalry * remind us of the 
fantastic tapestries known as Gobelins, whose rich texture 
and brilliant colors are more pleasing to our eyes than 
edifying to our souls. We behold knightly pageantry, 
shepherds engaged in festive sports, hand-to-hand com- 
bats, and ancient customs, charmingly intermingled. It 
is all very pretty and picturesque, but shallow; brilliant 
superficiality. Among the imitators of Fouque, as among 
the imitators of Walter Scott, this mannerism of portray- 
ing — not the inner nature of men and things, but merely 
the outward garb and appearance — was carried to still 
greater extremes. This shallow art and frivolous style is 
still [1833] in vogue in Germany as well as in England 
and France. ... In lieu of a knowledge of mankind, our 
recent novelists evince a profound acquaintance with 
clothes." f 

* Andrew Lang reminds us that, after all, only three of the 
Waverley Novels are "chivalry romances." The following 
are the only numbers of the series that have to do with the 
Middle Ages: "Count Robert of Paris," czr^rt 1090 a. d. ; "The 
Betrothed," 1 1S7 ; "The Talisman," 1193; " Ivanhoe, " 1194 ; 
"The Fair Maid of Perth," 1402; "Quentin Durward," 1470; 
"Anne of Geierstein," 1474-77. 

■j- " The Romantic School in Germany, " p. 187. Cf. Stendhal, 
"Walter Scott et la Princesse de Cleves." "Mes reflexions 
seront mal accueilles. Une immense troupe de litterateurs 
est iuteressee a porter aux nues Sir Walter Scott et sa mani- 
ere. L' habit et le collier de cuivre d'un serf du moyen age 
sont plus facile a decrire que les mouvements du coeur hu- 
main. . . . N'oublions pas un autre avantage de I'ecole de 
Sir Walter Scott : la description d'un costume et la. pass d'un 
personnage . . . prennent au moins deux pages. Les mouve- 
ments de r&mefourniraient a peine quelques lignes. Ouvrez 
au hazard un des volumes de la ' Princesse de Cleves, ' prenez 
dix pages au hasard, et ensuite comparez les aux dix pages 
d" Ivanhoe ' ou de ' Quentin Durward ' : cesderniers ouvrages 
ont un merite historique. lis apprennent quelques petites 



Walter Scott. 37 

Elsewhere Heine acknowledges a deeper reason for 
the popularity of the Scotch novels. " Their theme . . . 
is the mighty sorrow for the loss of national peculiarities 
swallowed up in the universality of the newer culture — 
a sorrow which is now throbbing in the hearts of all peo- 
ples. For national memories lie deeper in the human 
breast than is generally thought." But whatever rank 
may be ultimately assigned to the historical novel as an 
art form, Continental critics are at one with the British 
in crediting its invention to Scott. "It is an error," says 
Heine, "not to recognise Walter Scott as the founder of 
the so-called historical romance, and to endeavour to 
trace it to German imitation." He adds that Scott was a 
Protestant, a lawyer and a Scotchman, accustomed to 
action and debate, in whose works the aristocratic and 
democratic elements are in wholesome balance ; " where- 
as our German romanticists eliminated the democratic 
element entirely from their novels, and returned to the 
ruts of those crazy romances of knight-errantry that fiour- 

choses sur I'histoire aux gens qui I'ignorent ou qui le savent 
mal. Ce merite historique a cause un grand plaisir: je ne le 
nie pas, mais c'est ce merite historique qui se fanera le pre- 
mier. . . . Dans 146 ans, Sir Walter Scott ne sera pas a la 
hauteur ou Corneille nous apparait 146 ans apres sa mort." 
"To write a modern romance of chivalry," says Jeffrey, in his 
review of "Marmion " in the Edinbtirgh, "seems to be much 
such a phantasy as to build a modern abbey or an English 
pagoda. . . . [Scott's] genius, seconded by the omnipo- 
tence of fashion, has brought chivalry again into temporary 
favor. Fine ladies and gentlemen now talk, indeed, of 
donjons, keeps, tabards, 'scutcheons, tressures, caps of 
maintenance, portcullises, wimples, and we know not what 
besides ; just as they did, in the days of Dr. Darwin's popu- 
larity, of gnomes, sylphs, oxygen, gossamer, polygynia, and 
polyandria. That fashion, however, passed rapidly away, 
and Mr. Scott should take care that a different sort of ped- 
antry," etc. 



38 t// History of English Romanticism, 

ished before Cervantes." * '" Quel est I'ouvrage litt^- 
raire," asks Stendhal in 1823,! "qui a le plus reussi en 
France depuis dix ans? Les romans de Walter Scott. 
. . . On s'est moque a Paris pendant vingt ans du roman 
historique; I'Academie a prouve doctement le ridicule de 
ce genre; nous y croyions tous, lorsque Walter Scott a 
paru, son Waverley a la main; et Balantyne, son libraire 
vient de mourir millionaire." \ 

Lastly the service of the Waverley Novels to history 
was an important one. Palgrave says that historical fic- 
tion is the mortal enemy of history, and Leslie Stephen 
adds that it is also the enemy of fiction. In a sense both 
sayings are true. Scott was not always accurate as to 
facts and sinned freely against chronology. But he 
rescued a wide realm from cold oblivion and gave it 
back to human consciousness and sympathy. It is treat- 
ing the past more kindly to misrepresent it in some par- 
ticulars, than to leave it a blank to the imagination. 
The eighteenth-century historians were incurious of li/e. 
Their spirit was general and abstract; they were in search 
of philosophical formulas. Gibbon covers his subject 
with a lava-flood of stately rhetoric which stiffens into a 
uniform stony coating over the soft surface of life. Scott 
is primarily responsible for that dramatic, picturesque 



*For an exhaustive review of Scott's influence on the evo- 
lution of historical fiction in France, consult Maigron, " Le 
Roman Historique," etc. A longish passage from this work 
will be found at the end of the present chapter. For English 
imitators and successors of the Waverley Novels, see Cross, 
"Development of the English Novel," pp. 136-48. See also 
De Quincey's "Literary Reminiscences," vol. iii., for an 
amusing account of "Walladmor" (1824), a pretended Ger- 
man translation of a non-existent Waverley novel. 

f "Racine et Shakespeare." X "Don Quixote." 



Walter Scott. 39 

treatment of history which we find in Michelet and Car- 
lyle. "These historical novels," testifies Carlyle, "have 
taught all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and 
yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and 
others, till so taught; that the bygone ages of the world 
were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state 
papers, controversies, and abstractions of men. ... It is 
a great service, fertile in consequences, this that Scott 
has done; a great truth laid open by him," * In France, 
too, historians like Barante and Augustin Thierry, were 
Scott's professed disciples. The latter confesses, in a 
well-known passage, that " Ivanhoe " was the inspirer of 
his "Conquete d'Angleterre," and styles the novelist "le 
plus grand maitre qu'il y ait jamais eu en fait de divi- 
nation historique." f 

Scott apprehended the Middle Ages on their spectacu- 
lar, and more particularly, their military side. He ex- 
hibits their large, showy aspects: battles, processions, 
hunts, feasts in hall, tourneys, J sieges, and the like. The 
motley mediaeval world swarms in his pages, from the 
king on his throne down to the jester with his cap and 
bells. But it was the outside of it that he saw ; the noise, 
bustle, colour, stirring action that delighted him. Into its 
spiritualities he did not penetrate far; its scholasticisms, 
strange casuistries, shuddering faiths, grotesque distor- 

* "Sir Walter Scott." 

f Dix ans d' etudes historiques" : preface. 

X Walter Bagehot says that " Ivanhoe " "describes the Mid- 
dle Ages as we should have wished them to be, " ignoring 
their discomforts and harsh barbarism. "Every boy has 
heard of tournaments and has a firm persuasion that in an 
age of tournaments life was thoroughly well understood. A 
martial society where men fought hand to hand on good 
horses with large lances," etc. ("The Waverley Novels"). 



40 tA History of English l^omanticism . 

tions of soul; its religious mysticisms, asceticisms, 
agonies; the ecstactic reveries of the cloister, terrors of 
hell, and visions of paradise. It was the literature of 
the knight, not of the monk, that appealed to him. He 
felt the awfulness and the beauty of Gothic sacred archi- 
tecture and of Catholic ritual. The externalities of the 
mediseval church impressed him, whatever was pictur- 
esque in its ceremonies or august in its power. He pic- 
tured effectively such scenes as the pilgrimage to Melrose 
in the "Lay"; the immuring of the renegade nun in 
" Marmion " ; the trial of Rebecca for sorcery by the 
Grand Master of the Temple in " Ivanhoe." Ecclesiasti- 
cal figures abound in his pages, jolly friars, holy hermits, 
lordly prelates, grim inquisitors, abbots, priors, and 
priests of all descriptions, but all somewhat conventional 
and viewed ab extra. He could not draw a saint.* Sig- 
nificant, therefore, is his indifference to Dante, the poet 
par excellence of the Catholic Middle Age, the epitomizer 
of mediaeval thought. " The plan " of the " Divine Com- 
edy," "appeared to him unhappy; the personal malignity 
and strange mode of revenge presumptuous and uninter- 
esting." Scott's genius was antipathetic to Dante's; and 
he was as incapable of taking a lasting imprint from his 
intense, austere, and mystical spirit, as from the nebulous 
gloom of the Ossianic poetry. Though conservative, he 
was not reactionary after the fashion of the German 
" throne-and-altar " romanticists, but remained always a 
good Church of England man and an obstinate opponent 



*"Of enthusiasm in religion Scott always spoke very se- 
verely. ... I do not think there is a single study in all his 
romances of what may be fairly called a pre-eminently spiri- 
tual character" (R. H. Hutton : "Sir Walter Scott," p. 126). 



Walter Scott. 41 

of Catholic emancipation.* "Creeds are data in his 
novels," says Bagehot; "people have dififerent creeds, 
but each keeps his own." 

Scott's interest in popular superstitions was constant. 
As a young man — in his German ballad period — they 
affected his imagination with a " pleasing horror." But 
as he grew older, they engaged him less as a poet than 
as a student of Cultur geschichte. 

A wistful sense of the beauty of these old beliefs — a 
rational smile at their absurdity — such is the tone of his 
"Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft" (1830), a pas- 
sage or two from which will give his attitude very pre- 
cisely; an attitude, it will be seen, which is after all not 
so very different from Addison's, allowing for the dis- 
tance in time and place, and for Scott's livelier imagina- 
tion.! Scott had his laugh at Mrs. Radcliffe, and in his 

*" Unopposed, the Catholic superstition may sink to dust, 
with all its absurd ritual and solemnities. Still it is an awful 
risk. The world is in fact as silly as ever, and a good com- 
petence of nonsense will always find believers" ("Diary" 
for 1829). 

t See vol. i., p. 42. "We almost envy the credulity of 
those who. in the gentle moonlight of a summer night in Eng- 
land, amid the tangled glades of a deep forest, or the turfy 
swell of her romantic commons, could fancy they saw the 
fairies tracing their sportive ring. But it is in vain to regret 
illusions which, however engaging, must of necessity yield 
their place before the increase of knowledge, like shadows at 
the advance of morn " ("Demonology," p. 183). "Tales of 
ghosts and demonology are out of date at forty years of age 
and upward. ... If I were to write on the subject at all, it 
should have been during a period of life when I could have 
treated it with more interesting vivacity. . . . Even the pres- 
ent fashion of the world seems to be ill-suited for studies of 
this fantastic nature ; and the most ordinary mechanic has 
learning sufficient to laugh at the figments which in former 
times were believed by persons far advanced in the deepest 
knowledge of the age " {Ibid., p. 398). 



42 e/^ History of English ^{omanticism. 

reviews of Hoffmann's "Tales" and Maturin's "Fatal 
Revenge" * he insists upon the delicacy with which the 
supernatural must be treated in an age of disbelief. His 
own management of such themes, however, though much 
superior to Walpole's or Mrs. Radcliffe's, has not the 
subtle art of Coleridge. The White Lady of Avenel, 
e.g., in "The Abbot," is a notorious failure. There was 
too much daylight in his imagination for spectres to be 
quite at home. " The shapes that haunt thought's wilder- 
nesses " ; the "night side of things"; the real shudder 
are not there, as in Hawthorne or in Poe. Walter Pater f 
says that Meinhold's " Amber Witch " has more of the 
true romantic spirit than Tieck, who was its professional 
representative. On the contrary, it has less of the ro- 
mantic spirit, but more of the mediseval fact. It is a 
literal, realistic handling of the witch superstition, as 
Balzac's " Succube," in the "Contes Drolatiques" is a 
satirical version of similar material. But Tieck's 
"Marchen " are the shadows thrown by mediaeval beliefs 
across a sensitive, modern imagination, and are in result, 
therefore, romantic. Scott's dealing with subjects of the 
kind is midway between Meinhold and Tieck. He does 
not blink the ugly, childish, stupid, and cruel features 
of popular superstition, but throws the romantic glamour 
over them, precisely as he does over his "Charlie over 
the water" Jacobites. J 

Again Scott's apprehension of the spirit of chivalry, 
though less imperfect than his apprehension of the spirit 

* See vol. i., pp. 249 and 420. 

f "Postscript" to "Appreciations." 

X For the rarity of the real romantic note in mediaeval writ- 
ers see vol. i., pp. 26-28, and Appendix B to the present 
chapter. 



Walter Scott. 43 

of mediceval Catholicism, was but partial. Of the themes 
which Ariosto sang — 

"Le donne, i cavalier, I'arme, gli amori, 
Le cortesie, I'audaci imprese io canto" — 

the northern Ariosto sang bravely the arme and the 
andaci imprese ; less confidently the amori and the cortesie. 
He could sympathise with the knight-errant's high sense 
of honour and his love of bold emprise; not so well with 
his service of dames. Mediaeval courtship or " love- 
drurye," the trembling self-abasement of the lover before 
his lady, the fantastic refinements and excesses of gal- 
lantry, were alien to Scott's manly and eminently practi- 
cal turn of mind. It is hardly possible to fancy him 
reading the "Roman de la Rose" with patience — he 
thought " Troilus and Creseyde " tedious, which Rossetti 
pronounces the finest of English love poems; or selecting 
for treatment the story of Heloise or Tristram and Iseult, 
or of " Le Chevalier de la Charette " ; or such a typical 
mediaeval life as that of Ulrich von Liechtenstein.* 
These were quite as truly beyond his sphere as a church 
legend like the life of Saint Margaret or the quest of the 
Sangreal. In the "Talisman" he praises in terms only 
less eloquent than Burke's famous words, "that wild 
spirit of chivalry which, amid its most extravagant and 
fantastic flights, was still pure from all selfish alloy — 
generous, devoted, and perhaps only thus far censurable, 
that it proposed objects and courses of action inconsistent 
with the frailties and imperfections of man." In " Ivan- 
hoe," too, there is something like a dithyrambic lament 

* See "Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature," by Ed- 
ward T. McLaughlin, p. 34. 



44 <^ History of English Romanticism. 

over the decay of knighthood — "The 'scutcheons have 
long mouldered from the walls," etc.; but even here, en- 
thusiasm is tempered by good sense, and Richard of the 
Lion Heart is described as an example of the "brilliant 
but useless character of a knight of romance." All this 
is but to say that the picture of the Middle Age which 
Scott painted was not complete. Still it was more nearly 
complete than has yet been given by any other hand; 
and the artist remains, in Stevenson's phrase, "the king 
of the Romantics." 



APPENDIX A. 

"Jamais homme de genie n'a eu I'honneur et le bon- 
heur d'etre imite par plus d'hommes de genie, si tous les 
grands ecrivains de I'epoque romantique depuis Victor 
Hugo jusqu'k Balzac et depuis Alfred de Vigny jusqu'^ 
Merimee, lui doivent tous et se sont tous glorifies de 
lui devoir quelque chose. ... II doit nous suffire pour 
I'instant d'affirmer que I'influence de Walter Scott est h. 
la racine meme des grandes oeuvres qui ont donne au 
nouveau genre tant d'eclat dans notre litterature; que 
c'est elle qui les a inspire'es, suscitees, fait eclore; que 
sans lui nous n'aurions ni ' Hans d'Islande,' ni ' Cinq- 
Mars,' ni ' Les Chouans,' ni la ' Chronique de Charles 
IX.,' ni ' Notre Dame de Paris,' . . . Ce n'est rien moins 
que le romantisme lui-meme dont elle a hate I'incubation, 
facilite I'eclosion, aide' le developpement." — Maigron, 
"Le Roman Historique," p. 143. 

" II nous faut d'abord constater que c'est veritablement 
de Walter Scott, et de Walter Scott seal, que commence 
cette fureur des choses du moyen age, cette manie de 



Walter Scott. 45 

couleur locale qui sevit avec tant d'intensite quelque 
temps avant et longtemps apres 1830, et done qu'il reste, 
au moins pour ce qui est de la description, le principal 
initiateur de la generation nouvelle. Sans doute et de 
toute part, cette resurrection du moyen age e'tait des long- 
temps preparee. Le ' Genie du Christianisme,' le * Cours 
de litterature dramatique ' de Schlegel, T'Allemagne' de 
Mme. de Stael avaient fait des moeurs chretiennes et 
chevaleresques le fondement et la condition de renouvelle- 
ment de I'art frangais. Et, en effet, des 1802, le moyen 
age etait decouvert, la cathedrale gothique restaurde, I'art 
Chretien remis k la place eminente d'oli il aurait fallu ne 
jamais le laisser choir. Mais ou sont les ceuvres execu- 
tees d'apres ce modele et ces principes? S'il est facile 
d'apercevoir et de determiner la cathedrale religieuse de 
Chateaubriand, est il done si aise de distinguer sa cathe- 
drale poetique? . . . Uncourantvigoureux, que le' Genie 
du Christianisme' et les 'Martyrs' ont puissamment 
contribue k de'terminer, fait deriver les imaginations vers 
les choses gothiques; volontiers, I'esprit frangais se re- 
tourne alors vers le passe comme vers la seule source de 
poesie; et voici qu'un Stranger vient se faire son guide 
et fait miroiter, devant tous les yeux eblouis, la fantas- 
magorie du moyen age, donjons et creneaux, cuirasses et 
belles armures, haquen^es et palefrois, chevaliers re- 
splendissants et mignonnes et delicates chatelaines. . . . 
Sur ses traces, on se precipita avec furie dans la voie 
qu'il venait subitement d'e'largir. Ce moyen age, jusqu'k 
lui si convoitd et si infecond, devinait enfin une source 
in^puisable d'emotions et de productions artistiques. 
La ' cathedrale ' etait bien restauree cette fois. Elle le 
fut meme trop, et borda trop obstinement tous les sentiers 



46 <i/l History of English l^manticism. 

litteraires. Mais de cet exces, si vite fatigant, c'est 
Walter Scott et non Chateaubriand, quoi qu'il en ait pu 
dire, qui reste le grand coupable. II fit plus que de- 
couvrir le moyen age; il le mit ^ la mode parmi les 
Frangais," — Ibid., pp. 195 j^ 



APPENDIX B. 

"The magical touch and the sense of mystery and all 
the things that are associated with the name romance, 
when that name is applied to ' The Ancient Mariner,' or 
' La Belle Dame sans Merci,' or ' The Lady of Shalott,' 
are generally absent from the most successful romances of 
the great mediaeval romantic age. . . . The true roman- 
tic interest is very unequally distributed over the works 
of the Middle Ages, and there is least of it in the au- 
thors who are most representative of the ' age of chivalry.' 
There is a disappointment prepared for any one who 
looks in the greater romantic authors of the twelfth cen- 
tury for the music of ' The Faery Queene ' or ' La Belle 
Dame sans Merci.' . . . The greater authors of the 
twelfth century have more affinity to the ' heroic romance ' 
of the school of the ' Grand Cyrus ' than to the dreams of 
Spenser or Coleridge. . . . The magic that is wanting to 
the clear and elegant narrative of Benoit and Chrestien 
will be found elsewhere; it will be found in one form in 
the mystical prose of the ' Queste del St. Graal ' — a very 
different thing from Chrestien's ' Perceval ' — it will be 
found, again and again, in the prose of Sir Thomas 
Malory; it will be found in many ballads and ballad 
burdens, in ' William and Margaret,' in ' Binnorie,' in 
the ' Wife of Usher's Well,' in the ' Rime of the Count 



Walter Scott. 47 

Arnaldos,' in the ' Konigskinder '; it will be found in the 
most beautiful story of the Middle Ages, ' Aucassin and 
Nicolette,' one of the few perfectly beautiful stories in 
the world." — "Epic and Romance," W. P. Ker, London, 
1897, P-371.^ 



CHAPTER II. 
Colerf5gc, JBowIes, aiiO tbe pope Controversi^. 

While Scott was busy collecting the fragments of 
Border minstrelsy and translating German ballads,* two 
othex young poets, far to the south, were preparing their 
share in the literary revolution. In those same years 
(1795-98) Wordsworth and Coleridge were wandering to- 
gether over the Somerset downs and along the coast of 
Devon, catching glimpses of the sea towards Bristol or 
Linton, and now and then of the skeleton masts and gos- 
samer sails of a ship against the declining sun, like those 
of the phantom bark in " The Ancient Mariner." The 
first fruits of these walks and talks was that epoch-making 
book, the " Lyrical Ballads " ; the first edition of which 
was published in 1798, and the second, with an addi- 
tional volume and the famous preface by Wordsworth, in 
1800. The genesis of the work and the allotment of its 
parts were described by Coleridge himself in the " Bio- 
graphia Literaria" (18 17), Chapter XIV. 

** During the first year that Mr, Wordsworth and I were 
neighbours our conversations turned frequently on the 
two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the 
sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth 

* For Coleridge's relations with German romance, see vol. 
i., pp. 419-21. For his early interest in Percy, Ossian, and 
Chatterton, ibid., pp. 299, 328, 368-70. 

48 



Coleridge, Bowles, and the T'ope Controversy. 49 

of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by 
the modifying colours of imagination. . , . The thought 
suggested itself that a series of poems might be composed 
of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were 
to be, in part at least, supernatural ; . . . for the second 
class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life. . . . 
It was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to 
persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic. 
, . . With this view I wrote ' The Ancient Mariner,' and 
was preparing, among other poems, ' The Dark Ladie ' 
and the ' Christabel,' in which I should have more nearly 
realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt." 

Coleridge's contributions to romantic poetry are few 
though precious. Weighed against the imposing array of 
Scott's romances in prose and verse,* they seem like 
two or three little gold coins put into the scales to bal- 
ance a handful of silver dollars. He stands for so much 
in the history of English thought, he influenced his own 
and the following generation on so many sides, that his 
romanticism shows like a mere incident in his intellectual 
history. His blossoming time was short at the best, and 
ended practically with the century. After his return from 
Germany in 1799 and his settlement at Keswick in 1800, 
he produced little verse of any importance beyond the 
second part of "Christabel" (written in 1800, published 
in 1816). His creative impulse failed him, and he be- 
came more and more involved in theology, metaphysics, 
political philosophy, and literary criticism. 

♦ "There is as much difference between Coleridge's brief 
poem 'Christabel' and all the narrative poems of Walter 
Scott ... as between a precious essence and a coarse imita- 
tion of it got up for sale" (Leigh Hunt's "Autobiographj'," 
p. 197). 



50 iA History of English 'T^manticism. 

It appears, therefore, at first sight, a little odd that 
Coleridge's German biographer, Professor Brandl, should 
have treated his subject under this special aspect,* and 
attributed to him so leading a place in the romantic 
movement. Walter Scott, if we consider his life-long 
and wellnigh exclusive dedication of himself to the work 
of historic restoration — Scott, certainly, and not Cole- 
ridge was the "high priest of Romanticism." f Brandl is 
dissatisfied with the term Lake School, or Lakers, com- 
monly given to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, and 
proposes instead to call them the Romantic School, Ro- 
manticists (^Romantiker), surely something of a misnomer 
when used of an eclectic versifier like Southey, or a poet 
of nature, moral reflection, and humble life like Words- 
worth. Southey, in casting about him for a theme, some- 
times became for the nonce and so far as subject goes, a 
romancer; as in " Joan of Arc " (1799), "Madoc" (1805), 
and " Roderick the Goth " (1814) ; not to speak of trans- 
lations like "Amadis of Gaul," " Palmerin of England," 
and "The Chronicle of the Cid." But these were not 
due to the compelling bent of his genius, as in Scott. 
They were miscellaneous jobs, undertaken in the regular 



* "Samuel Taylor Coleridge und die Englische Romantik," 
Alois Brandl, Berlin, 18S6. 

t It is in view of his critical attitude, not of his poetry, that 
Saintsbury applies this title to Coleridge. "The attitude was 
that of a medisevalism inspired by much later learning, but 
still more by that intermediate or decadent Greek philosophy 
which had so much influence on the Middle Ages themselves. 
This is, in other words, the Romantic attitude, and Coleridge 
was the high priest of Romanticism, which, through Scott 
and Byron, he taught to Europe, repreaching it even to Ger- 
man)', from which it had partly come " ("A Short History of 
English Literature," by George Saintsbury, London, 1898, 
p. 656). 



Coleridge, Bowles, and the Tope Controversy. 5 1 

course of his business as a manufacturer of big, irregu- 
lar epics, Oriental, legendary, mythological, and what 
not; and as an untiring biographer, editor, and hack 
writer of all descriptions. Southey was a mechanical 
poet, with little original inspiration, and represents noth- 
ing in particular. Wordsworth again, though innovating 
in practice and theory against eighteenth-century tradi- 
tion, is absolutely unromantic in contrast with Scott and 
Coleridge. 

But it will be fair to let the critic defend his own 
nomenclature; and the passage which I shall quote will 
serve not only as another attempt to define romanticism, 
but also to explain why Brandl regards the Lake poets as 
our romantic school par excelle72ce. " ' Lake School ' is a 
name, but no designation. This was felt in England, 
where many critics have accordingly fallen into the oppo- 
site extreme, and maintained that the members of this 
group of poets had nothing in common beyond their per- 
sonal and accidental conditions. As if they had only 
lived together, and not worked together! In truth they 
were bound together by many a strong tie, and above all 
by one of a polemical kind, namely, by the aversion for 
the monotony that had preceded them, and by the strug- 
gle against merely dogmatic rules. Unbending uniform- 
ity is death! Let us be various and individual as life 
itself is. . . . Away with dry Rationalism! Let us fight 
it with all the powers we possess; whether by bold Pla- 
tonism or simple Bible faith; whether by enthusiastic 
hymns, or dreamy fairy tales; whether by the fabulous 
world of distant times and zones, or by the instincts of 
the children in the next village. Let us abjure the ever- 
recommended nostrum of imitation of the old masters in 



52 z/J History of English 'Romanticism. 

poetry, and rather attach ourselves to homely models, and 
endeavour, with their help, lovingly and organically to 
develop their inner life. These were the aims of Walter 
Scott and his Scotch school, only with such changes as 
local differences demanded. Individuality in person, 
nationality, and subject, and therefore the emphasis of all 
natural unlikeness, was the motto on both sides of the 
Tweed. And, as these men, when confronted by ele- 
ments peculiar, rare, and marvellous, designated such 
elements as ' romantic,' so may they themselves be justly 
called the ' Romantic School.' But the term is much 
misused, and requires a little elucidation. Shakespeare 
is usually called a romantic poet. He, however, never 
used the expression, and would have been surprised if 
any one had applied it to him. The term presupposes 
opposition to the classic style, to rhetorical deduction, 
and to measured periods, all of which were unknown in 
the time of the Renaissance, and first imported in that of 
the French Revolution. On the other hand, Words- 
worth, Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, and Walter Scott's cir- 
cle all branched off from the classical path with a direct- 
ness andconsistency which sharply distinguish them from 
their predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. Their 
predecessors had not broken with the Greek and Latin 
school, nor with the school of Pope; Chatterton copied 
Homer; Cowper translated him; Burns in his English 
verses, and Bowles in his sonnets, adhered to what is 
called the * pig-tail period'! The principal poems com- 
posed in the last decennium of the eighteenth century 
. . . adhered still more to classic tradition. In London 
the satires of Mathias and Gifford renewed the style of 
the ' Dunciad,' and the moral poems of Rogers that of 



Coleridge, Bowles, and the Tope Controversy. 53 

the ' Essay on Man.' Landor wrote his youthful ' Gebir ' 
in the style of Virgil, and originally in Latin itself. The 
amateur in German literature, William Taylor of Nor- 
wich, and Dr. Sayers, interested themselves especially for 
those works by Goethe which bear an antique character 
— for ' Iphigenia,' 'Proserpina,' 'Alexis and Dora.' Only 
when the war with France drew near was the classical 
feeling interrupted. Campbell, the Scotchman, and 
Moore, the Irishman, both well schooled by translations 
from the Greek, recalled to mind the songs of their own 
people, and rendered them popular with the fashionable 
world — though only by clothing them in classic garb. 
How different to the ' artificial rust' of ' Christabel '; to 
the almost exaggerated homeliness of ' We Are Seven'; 
and to the rude ' Lay of the Last Minstrel ' ! When at 
last, with the fall of Napoleon, the great stars — Byron, 
Shelley, Keats, and later the mature Landor — rose in the 
hemisphere, they had all imbibed from the Romantic 
school a warmer form of thought and feeling, and a num- 
ber of productive impulses; though, Euphorion-like, they 
still regarded the antique as their parent. They expressed 
much appreciation of the Romantic school, but their hearts 
were with ^schylus and Pindar. They contended for 
national character, but only took pleasure in planting it 
on classic soil. Byron's enthusiasm for Pope was not 
only caprice; nor was it mere chance that Byron should 
have died in Greece, and Shelley and Keats in Italy. 
Compared with what we may call these classical mem- 
bers of the Romantic school, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 
Scott . . . may be said to have taken nothing, whether 
in the form of translation or imitation, from classical 
literature; while they drew endless inspiration from the 



54 <^ History of English Romanticism. 

Middle Ages. In their eyes Pope was only a lucid, 
able, and clever journeyman. It is therefore fair to con- 
sider them, and them alone, as exponents of the Romantic 
school." * 

As to Byron and Shelley this criticism may do; as to 
Chatterton and Keats it is misleading. Wordsworth 
more romantic than Chatterton ! More romantic than 
Keats, because the latter often, and Wordsworth seldom, 
treats subjects from the antique! On the contrary, if 
''the name is graven on the workmanship," "Michael" 
and "The Brothers" are as classical as "Hyperion" or 
" Laodamia " or " The Hamadryad " ; " bald as the bare 
mountain-tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur." 
Bagehot expressly singles Wordsworth out as an example 
of pure or classic art, as distinguished from the ornate 
art of such poets as Keats and Tennyson. And Mr. 
Colvin hesitates to classify him with Landor only be- 
cause of his " suggestive and adumbrative manner " — not, 
indeed, he acknowledges, a romantic manner, and yet 
" quite distinct from the classical " ; i.e., because of the 
transcendental character of a portion of his poetry. But 
whatever may be true of the other members of the group, 
Coleridge at his best was a romantic poet. " Christabel " 
and "The Ancient Mariner," creations so exquisite 
sprung from the contact of modern imagination with 
mediaeval beliefs, are enough in themselves to justify the 
whole romantic movement. 

Among the literary influences which gave shape to 
Coleridge's poetry, Percy's ballads and Chatterton's 

* "Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic 
School," by Alois Brandl. Lady Eastlake's translation, 
London, 1887, PP- 219-23. 



Coleridge, Bowles, and the Vope Controversy. 55 

" Rowley Poems " are obvious and have already been 
mentioned. In his first volume of verse (1796), there is 
manifest a still stronger impulse from the sonnets of the 
Rev. William Lisle Bowles. We have noticed the reap- 
pearance of this discarded stanza form in the work of 
Gray, Mason, Edwards, Stillingfleet, and Thomas Warton, 
about the middle of the last century.* In 1782 Mrs. 
Charlotte Smith published a volume of sonnets, treating 
motives from Milton, Gray, Collins, Pope's " Eloisa " and 
Goethe's "Werther." But the writer who — through his 
influence upon Wordsworth more especially — contributed 
most towards the sonnet revival, was Bowles. In 1789 he 
had published a little collection of fourteen sonnets,f 
which reached a second edition with six pieces additional, 
in the same year. " His sonnets came into Wordsworth's 
hands (1793)," says Brandl, "just as he was leaving 
London with some friends for a morning's excursion; he 
seated himself in a recess on Westminster Bridge, and 
was not to be moved from his place till he had finished 
the little book. Southey, again, owned in 1832 that for 
forty years, he had taken the sweet and artless style of 
Bowles for a model." J In the first chapter of his " Bio- 
graphia Literaria" (1817) Coleridge tells how, when he 
had just entered on his seventeenth year, " the sonnets of 
Mr. Bowles, twenty in number and just then published in 
a quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented " 
to him by his school-fellow at Christ's Hospital, Thomas 

* See vol. i., pp. 160-61. 

f " Fourteen Sonnets, written chiefly on Picturesque 
Spots," Bath, 1789. 

t "Samuel Taylor Coleridge," p. 37. Cf. Wordsworth's 
Sonnets "Upon Westminster Bridge" (1802) and "Scorn Not 
the Sonnet. " 



$6 <iA History of English l{omanticism. 

Middleton, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta. "It was a 
double pleasure to me . , . that I should have received, 
from a friend so revered, the first knowledge of a poet 
by whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically 
delighted and inspired. My earliest acquaintances will 
not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and im- 
petuous zeal with which I laboured to make proselytes, 
not only of my companions, but of all with whom I con- 
versed, of whatever rank and in whatever place. As my 
school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I 
made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty 
transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to those 
who had in any way won my regard. And with almost 
equal delight did I receive the three or four following 
publications of the same author." To Bowles' poems 
Coleridge ascribes the credit of having withdrawn him 
from a too exclusive devotion to metaphysics and also a 
strengthened perception of the essentially unpoetic char- 
acter of Pope's poetry. " Among those with whom I con- 
versed there were, of course, very many who had formed 
their taste and their notions of poetry from the writings 
of Pope and his followers; or, to speak more generally, 
in that school of French poetry, condensed and invigo- 
rated by English understanding, which had predominated 
from the last century, I was not blind to the merits of 
this school, yet . . . they gave me little pleasure. . . , 
I saw that the excellence of this kind consisted in just 
and acute observations on men and manners in an artifi- 
cial state of society, as its matter and substance; and in 
the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigram- 
matic couplets, as its form, . . . The matter and diction 
seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic 



Coleridge, 'Bowles, and the Tope Controversy. 57 

thoughts as by thoughts translated into the language of 
poetry." Coleridge goes on to say that, in a paper written 
during a Cambridge vacation, he compared Darwin's 
"Botanic Garden" to a Russian ice palace, "glittering, 
cold, and transitory " ; that he expressed a preference for 
Collins' odes over those of Gray; and that in his "de- 
fence of the lines running into each other, instead of 
closing at each couplet; and of natural language . . . 
such as / wi// remember thee, instead of 

. . . Thy image on her wing 
Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring" 

he had continually to appeal to the example of the older 
English poets from Chaucer to Milton, "The reader," 
he concludes, "must make himself acquainted with the 
general style of composition that was at that time deemed 
poetry, in order to understand and account for the effect 
produced on me by the sonnets, the ' Monody at Matlock ' 
and the ' Hope ' of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar to origi- 
nal genius to become less and less striking, in proportion 
to its success in improving the taste and judgment of its 
contemporaries. The poems of West, indeed, had the 
merit of chaste and manly diction, but they were cold, 
and, if I may so express it, only dead-coloured; while in 
the best of Warton's, there is a stiffness which too often 
gives them the appearance of imitations from the Greek. 
Whatever relation, therefore, of cause or impulse, Percy's 
collection of ballads may bear to the most popular poems 
of the present day, yet in the more sustained and elevated 
style of the then living poets, Cowper and Bowles were, to 
the best of my knowledge, the first who combined natural 
thoughts with natural diction ; the first who reconciled 



$8 eA History of English %omanticism. 

the heart with the head." Coleridge adds in a note that 
he was not familiar with Cowper's "Task" till many 
years after the publication of Bowles' sonnets, though it 
had been published before them (1785). 

It would be hard to account for the effect of Bowles' 
sonnets on Coleridge, did we not remember that it is not 
necessarily the greatest literature that comes home to us 
most intimately, but that which, for some reason, touches 
us where we are peculiarly sensitive. It is a familiar 
experience with every reader, that certain books make an 
appeal to him which is personal and individual, an ap- 
peal which they make to few other readers — perhaps to 
no other reader — and which no other books make to him. 
It is something in them apart from their absolute value 
or charm, or rather it is something in /itm, some private 
experience of his own, some occult association in depths 
below consciousness. He has a perfectly just estimate 
of their small importance in the abstract; they are not 
even of the second or third rank. Yet they speak to him ; 
they seem written to him — are more to him, in a way, 
than Shakspere and Milton and all the public library of 
the world. In the line of light bringers who pass from 
hand to hand the torch of intelligential fire, there are 
men of most unequal stature, and a giant may stoop to 
take the precious flambeau from a dwarf. That Scott 
should have admired Monk Lewis, and Coleridge rever- 
enced Bowles, only proves that Lewis and Bowles had 
something to give which Scott and Coleridge were pecul- 
iarly ready to receive. 

Bowles' sonnets, though now little read, are not un- 
readable. They are tender in feeling, musical in verse, 
and pure in diction. They were mostly suggested by 



Coleridge, "Bowles, and the Tope Controversy. 59 

natural scenery, and are uniformly melancholy. Bowles 
could suck melancholy out of a landscape as a weasel 
sucks eggs. His sonnets continue the elegiac strain of 
Shenstone, Gray, Collins, Warton, and the whole "II 
Penseroso" school, but with a more personal note, ex- 
plained by a recent bereavement of the poet. " Those 
who know him," says the preface, " know the occasions 
of them to have been real; to the public he might only 
mention the sudden death of a deserving young woman 
with whom 

Sperabat longos heu ! ducere soles, 
Et fido acclinis consumuisse sinu. . . . 

This is nothing to the public; but it may serve in some 
measure to obviate the common remark on melancholy 
poetry, that it has been very often gravely composed, when 
possibly the heart of the writer had very little share in 
the distress he chose to describe. But there is a great 
difference between natural 2iX\d fabricated feelings even 
in poetry." Accordingly while the Miltonic group of 
last-century poets went in search of dark things — grots, 
caverns, horrid shades, and twilight vales; Bowles' mood 
bestowed its color upon the most cheerful sights and 
sounds of nature. The coming of summer or spring; 
the bells of Oxford and Ostend ; the distant prospect of 
the Malvern Hills, or the chalk cliffs of Dover; sunrise 
on the sea, touching "the lifted oar far off with sudden 
gleam"; these and the like move him to tears equally 
with the glimmer of evening, the sequestered woods of 
Wensbeck, the ruins of Netley Abbey,* or the frowning 
battlements of Bamborough Castle, where 

* Cf. vol. i., p. 182. 



6o c^ History of English 'Romanticism. 

" Pity, at the dark and stormy hour 
Of midnight, when the moon is hid on high. 
Keeps her lone watch upon the topmost tower." 

In " English Bards and Scotch Reviewers " Byron calls 

Bowles "the maudlin prince of mournful sonneteers," 

whose 

"... muse most lamentably tells 
What merry sounds proceed from Oxford bells."* 

Bowles' attitude had thus something more modern than 
that of the eighteenth-century elegiacs, and in unison 
with Coleridge's doctrine, that 

"... we receive but what we give, 
And in our life alone does nature live : 
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud." f 

A number of Bowles' sonnets were addressed to rivers, 
the Tweed, the Cherwell at Oxford, the Wensbeck, and 
the Itchin near Winton, poems which stand midway be- 
tween Thomas Warton's " To the River Lodon" and Cole- 
ridge's " To the River Otter," with Wordsworth's sonnet 
sequence, "On the River Duddon." A single sonnet of 

* See Sonnet xvii., "On Revisiting Oxford." 
See also Sonnet xi., "At Ostend: " 

"The mournful magic of their mingled chimes 
First waked my wondrous childhood into tears," 

And C/. Francis Mahony's "The Bells of Shandon" — 

"Whose sounds so wild would, in the days of childhood, 
Fling round my cradle their magic spells." 

And Moore's "Those Evening Bells." The twang of the 
wind-harp also resounds through Bowles' Sonnets. See for 
the ..Eolus' harp, vol. i., p. 165, and C/. Coleridge' s poem, 
"The Eolian Harp." 

f "Dejection: An Ode " (1802). 



Coleridge, 'Bowles, and the Tope Controversy. 6i 

Bowles will be enough to give a taste of his quality and 
to show what Coleridge got from him,* 

Bowles was a disciple in the "School of Warton." He 
was " one of Joseph Warton's Winchester wonders," says 
Peter Cunningham, in a note in the second edition of 
Campbell's "Specimens of the British Poets"; "and the 
taste he imbibed there for the romantic school of poetry 
was strengthened and confirmed by his removal to Trin- 
ity College, Oxford, when Tom Warton was master there." 
Bowles was always prompt to own that he had learned his 
literary principles from the Wartons; and among his 
poems is a monody written on the death of his old teacher, 
the master of Winchester College. His verses abound in 
Gothic imagery quite in the Wartonian manner; the 
" castle gleaming on the distant steep " ; " the pale moon- 
light in the midnight aisle " ; " some convent's ancient 
walls," along the Rhine. Weak winds complain like 
spirits through the ruined arches of Netley Abbey: 

"The beam 
Of evening smiles on the gray battlement, 
And yon forsaken tower that time has rent." 

* SONNET XX. 
November, lygs. 
There is strange music in the stirring wind 
When lowers the autumnal eve, and all alone 
To the dark wood's cold covert thou art gone 
Whose ancient trees, on the rough slope reclined, 
Rock, and at times scatter their tresses sear. 
If in such shades, beneath their murmuring. 
Thou late hast passed the happier hours of spring, 
With sadness thou wilt mark the fading year ; 
Chiefly if one with whom such sweets at morn 
Or eve thou'st shared, to distant scenes shall stray. 
O Spring, return ! return, auspicious May ! 
But sad will be thy coming, and forlorn, 
If she return not with thy cheering ray. 
Who from these shades is gone, gone far away." 



62 zA History of English l^pmanticism. 

His lines on Shakspere recall Collins in their in- 
sistence upon the "elvish" things in the plays: "The 
Tempest," " Midsummer Night's Dream," the weird sis- 
ters in "Macbeth," Ophelia's songs, the melancholy 
Jacques. The lines to Burke on his "Reflections on the 
Revolution in France," echo his celebrated dirge over 
fallen chivalry: 

"Though now no more proud chivalry recalls 
The tourneys bright and pealing festivals ; 
Though now on high her idle spear is hung. 
Though time her mouldering harp has half unstrung," etc.* 

The "Hymn to Woden" alludes to Gray's "Fatal Sis- 
ters." " St. Michael's Mount " summons up the forms of 
the ancient Druids, and sings how Fancy, 

"Sick of the fluttering fancies that engage 
The vain pursuits of a degenerate age, . . . 
Would fain the shade of elder days recall, 
The Gothick battlements, the bannered hall ; 
Or list of elfin harps the fabling rhyme ; 
Or, wrapt in melancholy trance sublime, 
Pause o'er the working of some wondrous tale, 
Or bid the spectres of the castle hail ! " 

Bowles' influence is traceable in Coleridge's earliest 
volume of verse (1796) in a certain diffused softness and 
gentle sensibility. This%legiac tone appears particularly 
in effusions ^like "Happiness," "The Sigh," "To a 
Young Ass," " To the Autumnal Moon," " Lines on an 
Autumnal Evening," "To the Nightingale"; in "Melan- 
choly: A Fragment" and "Elegy; imitated from Aken- 
side," both in the " Sibylline Leaves" (1797); and in 
numerous "lines," "monodies," "epitaphs," "odes," and 

*Cf. Scott's " Harp of the North, that mouldering long hast 
hung," etc. "Lady of the Lake," Canto L 



Coleridge, Bowles, and the Tope Controversy. 63 

" stanzas." * Coleridge soon came to recognise the weak- 
ness of his juvenile verses, and parodied himself — and 
incidentally Bowles — in three sonnets printed at the 
end of Chapter I. of the " Biographia Literaria," de- 
signed to burlesque his own besetting sins, a " doleful 
egotism," an affected simplicity, and the use of "elabo- 
rate and swelling language and imagery." He never 
attained much success in the use of the sonnet form. A 
series of twelve sonnets in his first collection opens with 
one to Bowles: 

"My heart has thanked thee, Bowles ! for those soft strains 
Whose sadness soothes me, like the murmuring 
Of wild bees in the sunny showers of spring," etc. 

More important to our inquiries than the poetry of 
Bowles is the occasion which he gave to the revival, under 
new conditions, of the Pope controversy. For it was over 
the body of Pope that the quarrel between classic and 
romantic was fought out in England, as it was fought out 
in France, a few years later, over the question of the 
dramatic unities and the mixture of tragedy and comedy 
in the drame. In 1806, just a half century after Joseph 
Warton published the first volume of his " Essay on 
Pope," Bowles' edition of the same poet appeared. In 
the life of Pope which was prefixed, the editor made 
some severe strictures on Pope's duplicity, jealousy, and 
other disagreeable traits, though not more severe than 
have been made by Pope's latest editor, Mr. Elwin, who 
has backed up his charges with an array of evidence 
fairly overwhelming. The edition contained likewise an 

* "Shall gentle Coleridge pass unnoticed here. 
To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear? " 

— "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." 



64 tA History of English '^Romanticism. 

essay on "The Poetical Character of Pope," in which 
Bowles took substantially the same ground that had been 
taken by his master, Joseph Warton, fifty years before. 
He asserted in brief that, as compared with Spenser, 
Shakspere, and Milton, Pope was a poet of the second 
order; that in his descriptions of nature he was inferior 
to Thomson and Cowper, and in lyrical poetry to Dryden 
and Gray; and that, except in his " Eloisa" and one or 
two other pieces, he was the poet of artificial manners 
and of didactic maxims, rather than of passions. Bowles' 
chief addition to Warton's criticism was the following 
paragraph, upon which the controversy that ensued chiefly 
hinged: "All images drawn from what is beautiful or 
sublime in the works of nature are more beautiful and 
sublime than any images drawn from art, and they are 
therefore J>er se (abstractedly) more poetical. In like 
manner those passions of the human heart, which belong 
to nature in general, zxq. per se more adapted to the higher 
species of poetry than those derived from incidental and 
transient manners." 

The admirers of Pope were not slow in joining issue 
"with his critic, not only upon his general estimate of the 
poet, but upon the principle here laid down. Thomas 
Campbell, in his" Specimens of the British Poets" (1819), 
defended Pope both as a man and a poet, and maintained 
that "exquisite descriptions of artificial objects are not 
less characteristic of genius than the description of sim- 
ple physical appearances." He instanced Milton's de- 
scription of Satan's spear and shield, and gave an ani- 
mated picture of the launching of a ship of the line as 
an example of the " sublime objects of artificial life." 
Bowles replied in a letter to Campbell on " The Invari- 



Coleridge, Bowles, and the Tope Controversy. 65 

able Principles of Poetry." He claimed that it was the 
appearances of nature, the sea and the sky, that lent sub- 
limity to the launch of the ship, and asked: "If images 
derived from art are as beautiful and sublime as those 
derived from nature, why was it necessary to bring your 
ship off the stocks?" He appealed to his adversary 
whether the description of a game of ombre was as poet- 
ical as that of a walk in the forest, and whether " the sylph 
of Pope, ' trembling over the fumes of a chocolate pot,' 
be an image as poetical as that of delicate and quaint 
Ariel, who sings ' Where the bee sucks, there lurk {sic) 
I,' " Campbell replied in the New Monthly Magazine, 
of which he was editor, and this drew out another rejoin- 
der from Bowles. Meanwhile Byron had also attacked 
Bowles in two letters to Murray (182 1), to which the in- 
defatigable pamphleteer made elaborate replies. The 
elder Disraeli, Gifford, Octavius Gilchrist, and one Mar- 
tin M'Dermot also took a hand in the fight — all against 
Bowles — and William Roscoe, the author of the " Life of 
Lorenzo de Medici, " attacked him in an edition of Pope 
which he brought out in 1824. The rash detractor of the 
little Twitnam nightingale soon found himself engaged 
single-handed against a host; but he was equal to the 
occasion, in volubility if not in logic, and poured out a 
series of pamphlets, covering in all some thousand pages, 
and concluding with " A Final Appeal to the Literary 
Public" (1825), followed by "more last words of Baxter," 
in the shape of "Lessons in Criticism to William Ros- 
coe" (1825). 

The opponents of Bowles maintained, in general, that 
in poetry the subject is nothing, but the execution is all ; 
that one class of poetry has, as such, no superiority over 



66 <i/l History of English l^mantictsm. 

another; and that poets are to be ranked by their excel- 
lence as artists, and not according to some imaginary 
scale of dignity in the different orders of poetry, as epic, 
didactic, satiric, etc. " There is, in fact," wrote Roscoe, 
"no poetry in any subject except what is called forth by 
the genius of the poet, , . . There are no great subjects 
but such as are made so by the genius of the artist." 
Byron said that to the question " whether ' the description 
of a game of cards be as poetical, supposing the execution 
of the artists equal, as a description of a walk in a forest,' 
it may be answered that the materials are certainly not 
equal, but that the ar/isf who has rendered the game of 
cards poetical is by far the greater of the two. But all 
this ' ordering ' of poets is purely arbitrary on the part of 
Mr. Bowles. There mayor may not be, in fact, different 
'orders' of poetry, but the poet is always ranked accord- 
ing to his execution, and not according to his branch of 
the art." Byron also contended, like Campbell, that art 
is just as poetical as nature, and that it was not the water 
that gave interest to the ship but the ship to the water. 
"What was it attracted the thousands to the launch? 
They might have seen the poetical * calm water' at Wrap- 
ping or in the London lock or in the Paddington Canal 
or in a horse-pond or in a slop-basin." Without natural 
accessories — the sun, the sky, the sea, the wind — Bowles 
had said, the ship's properties are only blue bunting, coarse 
canvas, and tall poles. " So they are," admits Byron, 
"and porcelain is clay, and man is dust, and flesh is 
grass; and yet the two latter at least are the subjects of 
much poesy. . . . Ask the traveller what strikes him as 
most poetical, the Parthenon or the rock on which it 
stands. . . . Take away Stonehenge from Salisbury plain 



Coleridge, Bowles, and the Tope Controversy. 67 

and it is nothing more than Hounslow Heath or any other 
unenclosed down. . . . There can be nothing more poet- 
ical in its aspect than the city of Venice; does this de- 
pend upon the sea or the canals? ... Is it the Canal 
Grande or the Rialto which arches it, the churches which 
tower over it, the palaces which line and the gondolas 
which glide over the waters, that render this city more 
poetical than Rome itself? . . . Without these the water 
would be nothing but a clay-coloured ditch. . , . There 
would be nothing to make the canal of Venice more poet- 
ical than that of Paddington." 

There was something futile about this whole discus-' 
sion. It was marked with that fatally superficial and 
mechanical character which distinguished all literary 
criticism in Europe before the time of Lessing in Ger- 
many, and of Wordsworth and Coleridge in England. In 
particular, the cardinal point on which Pope's rank as a 
poet was made to turn was really beside the question. 
There is no such essential distinction as was attempted 
to be drawn between "natural objects" and "objects of 
artificial life," as material for poetry. In a higher syn- 
thesis, man and all his works are but a part of nature, 
as Shakspere discerned: 

" Nature is made better by no mean 
But nature makes that mean : so over that art 
Which you say adds to nature, is an art 
That nature made : the art itself is nature." 

Shakspere, as well as Pope, dealt with artificial life, 
i.e., with the life of man in society, but how differently! 
The reason why Pope's poetry fails to satisfy the heart 
and the imagination resides not in his subjects — so far 
Campbell and Byron were right — but in his mood; in his 



68 qA History of English 'T{pmanticism. 

imperfect sense of beauty and his deficiency in the high- 
est qualities of the poet's soul. I may illustrate this by 
an arrow from Byron's own quiver. To prove how much 
poetry may be associated with " a simple, household, 
* indoor,' artificial, and ordinary image," he cites the 
famous stanza in Cowper's poem to Mrs. Unwin : 

"Thy needles, once a shining store, 
For my sake restless heretofore, 
Now rust disused and shine no more, 
My Mary." 

Let us contrast with this a characteristic passage from 
" The Rape of the Lock," which also contains an artificial 
image : 

"On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore 
Which Jews might kiss and intidels adore." 

What is the difference.'* It is in the feeling of the poet. 
Pope's couplet is very charming, but it is merely gal- 
lantry, a neatly turned compliment, playful, only half 
sincere, a spice of mockery lurking under the sugared 
words; while in Cowper's lines the humble domestic im- 
plement is made sacred by the emotions of pity, sorrow, 
gratitude, and affection with which it is associated. The 
reason why Pope is not a high poet — or perhaps a poet at 
all in the best sense of the word — is indicated by Cole- 
ridge with his usual acuteness and profundity in a sen- 
tence already quoted; that Pope's poetry both in matter 
and diction was " characterised not so much by poetic 
thoughts, as by thoughts translated into the language of 
poetry." 

Bowles, on the whole, had hold of the right end of the 
controversy; his instinct was correct, but he was a 
wretched controversialist. As a poet in the minor key, 



Coleridge, 'Bowles, and the Tope Contro'versy. 69 

he was tolerable; but as a prose writer, he was a very 
dull person and a bore. He was rude and clumsy; he 
tried to be sarcastic and couldn't; he had damnable iter- 
ation. Lowell speaks of his "peculiarly helpless way," 
and says: "Bowles, in losing his temper, lost also what 
little logic he had, and though, in a vague way, aestheti- 
cally right, contrived always to be argumentatively wrong. 
Anger made worse confusion in a brain never very clear, 
and he had neither the scholarship nor the critical faculty 
for a vigorous exposition of his own thesis. Never was 
wilder hitting than his, and he laid himself open to dread- 
ful punishment, especially from Byron, whose two letters 
are masterpieces of polemic prose," Indeed, the most 
interesting feature of the Pope controversy is Byron's part 
in it and the light which it sheds on his position in rela- 
tion to the classic and romantic schools. Before the defi 
nite outbreak of the controversy, Byron had attacked 
Bowles for his depreciation of Pope, in " English Bards 
and Scotch Reviewers" (1809), in a passage in which he 
wished that Bowles had lived in Pope's time, so that 
Pope might have put him into the " Dunciad." 

It seems at first sight hard to reconcile Byron's evi- 
dently sincere admiration for Pope with the ultra-roman- 
tic cast of his own poetry — romantic, as Pater says, 
in mood if not in subject. In his early fondness for 
Ossian, his intense passion, his morbid gloom, his ex- 
altation in wild and solitary places, his love of night and 
storm, of the desert and the ocean, in the careless and 
irregular outpour of his verse, in his subjectivity, the 
continual presence of the man in the work — in all these 
particulars Byron was romantic and would seem to have 
had little in common with Pope. But there was another 



7© ft/f History of English 'T^pmanticism. 

side to Byron — and William Rossetti thinks his most 
characteristic side — viz., his wit and understanding; and 
this side sympathised heartily with Pope. It is well 
known that when Byron came back from the East he had 
in his trunk besides the manuscript of "Childe Harold," 
which he thought little of, certain " Hints from Horace" 
which the world thinks less of, but which he was eager to 
have published, while Dallas was urging him to print 
"Childe Harold." "English Bards and Scotch Re- 
viewers" is a thoroughly Popeian satire; and "The 
Vision of Judgment," though not in couplets but in ottava 
rima, is one of the best personal satires in English. It 
has all of Pope's malicious wit, with a sweep and glow, 
which belonged to Byron as a poet rather than as a satirist, 
and which Pope never had. Lowell thinks, too, that what 
Byron admired in Pope was "that patience in careful fin- 
ish which he felt to be wanting in himself and in most 
of his contemporaries." 

With all this there probably mingled something of 
perversity and exaggeration in Byron's praises of Pope. 
He hated the Lakers, and he delighted to use Pope 
against them as a foil and a rod. He at least was every- 
thing that they were not. Doubtless in the Pope contro- 
versy, his "object was mainly mischief," as Lowell says. 
Byron loved a fight; he thought the Rev. W. L. Bowles 
an ass, and he determined to have some fun with him. 
Besides the two letters to Murray in 182 1, an open letter 
of Byron's to Isaac Disraeli, dated March 15, 1820, and 
entitled " Some Observations upon an article in Black- 
wood's Magazine,'''' * contains a long passage in vindica- 
tion of Pope and in denunciation of contemporary poetry 
* No. xxix., August, 1819, "Remarks on Don Juan." 



Coleridge, 'Bowles, and the Tope Controversy. 7 1 

— a passage which is important not only as showing 
Byron's opinions, but as testifying to the very general 
change in taste which had taken place since 1756, when 
Joseph Wartonwas so discouraged by the public hostility 
to his " Essay on Pope" that he withheld the second vol- 
ume for twenty-six years. " The great cause of the pres- 
ent deplorable state of English poetry," writes Byron, " is 
to be attributed to that absurd and systematic deprecia- 
tion of Pope in which, for the last few years, there has 
been a kind of epidemical concurrence. Men of the most 
opposite opinions have united upon this topic." He then 
goes on to praise Pope and abuse his own contemporaries, 
especially the Lake poets, both in the most extravagant 
terms. Pope he pronounces the most perfect and harmo- 
nious of poets. " Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge," 
he says, " had all of them a very natural antipathy to 
Pope . . . but they have been joined in it by . . . the 
whole heterogeneous mass of living English poets except- 
ing Crabbe, Rogers, Gifford, and Campbell, who, both 
by precept and practice, have proved their adherence ; and 
by me, who have shamefully deviated in practice, but have 
ever loved and honoured Pope's poetry with my whole 
soul." There is ten times more poetry, he thinks, in the 
" Essay on Man " than in the " Excursion " ; and if you 
want passion, where is to be found stronger than in the 
"Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard"? To the sneer that 
Pope is only the " poet of reason " Byron replies that he 
will undertake to find more lines teeming with imagina- 
tion in Pope than in any two living poets. "In the mean 
time," he asks, "what have we got instead? . . . The 
Lake school," and "a deluge of flimsy and unintelligible 
romances imitated from Scott and myself." He proph- 



72 t/^ History of English '^manticism. 

esies that all except the classical poets, Crabbe, Rogers, 
and Campbell, will survive their reputation, acknowl- 
edges that his own practice as a poet is not in harmony 
with his principles, and says: "I told Moore not very 
long ago, ' We are all wrong except Rogers, Crabbe, and 
Campbell.'" In the first of his two letters to Murray, 
Byron had taken himself to task in much the same way. 
He compared the romanticists to barbarians who had 
" raised a mosque by the side of a Grecian temple of the 
purest architecture"; and who were "not contented with 
their own grotesque edifice unless they destroy the prior 
and purely beautiful fabric which preceded, and which 
shames them and theirs for ever and ever. I shall be 
told that amongst those I have been (or it may be still 
am) conspicuous — true, and I am ashamed of it. I have 
been amongst the builders of this Babel . . . but never 
among the envious destroyers of the classic temple of 
our predecessor." " Neither time nor distance nor grief 
nor age can ever diminish my veneration for him who is 
the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all 
feelings, and of all stages of existence. The delight of 
my boyhood, the study of my manhood, perhaps he may 
be the consolation of my age. His poetry is the Book 
of Life." * 

* "Time was, ere 3'et in these degenerate days 
Ignoble themes obtained mistaken praise. 
When sense and wit with poesy allied. 
No fabled graces, flourished side by side. . . . 
Then, in this happy isle, a Pope's pure strain 
Sought the rapt soul to charm, nor sought in vain ; 
A polished nation's praise aspired to claim. 
And raised the people's, as the poet's fame. . . . 
[But] Milton, Dryden, Pope, alike forgot. 
Resign their hallowed bays to Walter Scott." 

— "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." 



Coleridge, 'Bowles, and the Tope Controversy. 73 

Strange language this from the author of "Childe 
Harold " and " The Corsair " ! But the very extravagance 
of Byron's claims for Pope makes it plain that he was 
pleading a lost cause. When Warton issued the first vol- 
ume of his " Essay on Pope," it was easy for leaders of 
literary opinion, like Johnson and Goldsmith, to pooh- 
pooh the critical canons of the new school. But when 
Byron wrote, the esthetic revolution was already accom- 
plished. The future belonged not to Campbell and Gif- 
ford and Rogers and Crabbe, but to Wordsworth and 
Scott and Coleridge and Shelley and Keats; to Byron 
himself, the romantic poet, but not to Byron the laudator 
temporis acti. The victory remained with Bowles, not 
because he had won it by argument, but because opinion 
had changed, and changed probably once and for all.* 

*For the benefit of any reader who may wish to follow up 
the steps of the Pope controversy, I give the titles of Bowles' 
successive pamphlets. " The Invariable Principles of Poetry : 
A Letter to Thomas Campbell, Esq.," 1819. "A Reply to an 
'Unsentimental Sort of Critic,'" Bath, 1820. [This was :n 
answer to a review of "Spence's Anecdotes" in the Qiiarh'r- 
/)' for October, 1820.] "A Vindication of the Late Editor of 
Pope's Works, " London, 1821, second edition. [This was 
also a reply to the Oiiarierly reviewer and to Gilchrist's 
letters in the London Magazine, and was first printed in 
vol. xvii., Nos. 33, 34, and 35 of the Pamphleteer.'^ "An 
Answer to Some Observations of Thomas Campbell, Esq., in 
his Specimens of British Poets" (1S22). "An Address to 
Thomas Campbell, E.sq., Editor of the New Monthly Maga- 
zine, in Consequence of an Articl«fin that Publication " (1822). 
" Letters to Lord Byron on a Question of Poetical Criticism, " 
London, 1822. "A Final Appeal to the Literary Public Rel- 
ative to Pope, in Reply to Certain Observations of Mr. Ros- 
coe," London, 1825. "Lessons in Criticism to William Ros- 
coe, Esq., with Further Lessons in Criticism to a Quarterly 
Reviewer." London, 1S26. Gilchrist's three letters to Bowles 
were published in 1820-21. M'Dermot's "Letter to the Rev. 
W. L. Bowles in Reply to His Letter to Thomas Campbell, 
Esq.. and to His Two Letters to Lord Byron," was printed at 
London, in 1822. 



74 <^ History of English 'T^manticism. 

Coleridge's four contributions to the " Lyrical Ballads " 
included his masterpiece, " The Ancient Mariner." This 
is the high-water mark of romantic poetry; and, familiar 
as it is, cannot be dismissed here without full examina- 
tion. As to form, it is a long narrative ballad in seven 
" fyts " or parts, and descends from that " Bible of the 
romantic reformation," Bishop Percy's " Reliques." The 
verse is the common ballad stanza — eights and sixes — 
enriched by a generous use of medial rhyme and alliter- 
tion: 

"The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew. 
The furrow followed free : 
We were the first that ever burst 
Into that silent sea " ; 

varied and prolonged, moreover, by the introduction of 
additional lines with alternate riming, with couplets 
and sometimes with triplets. There are many five-lined 
and six-lined stanzas, and one — the longest in the poem 
— of nine lines. But these metric variations are used 
with temperance. The stanza form is never complex; it 
is built up naturally from the ballad stanza upon which 
it rests and to which it constantly returns as its norm and 
type. Of the one hundred and forty-two stanzas in the 
poem, one hundred and six are the ordinary four-lined 
stanzas of popular poetry. The language, too, is not 
obtrusively archaic as it is in Chatterton and some 
of the Spenserians; at most an occasional "wist" 
or "eftsoons"; now and then a light accent, in ballad 
fashion, on the final syllable of a rime-word like mar- 
iner or countrie. There is no definite burden, which 
would have been out of place in a poem that is narrative 
and not lyrical ; but the ballad habits of phrase repeti- 



Coleridge, Bowles, and the Tope Controversy. 75 

tion and question and answer are sparingly employed. * In 
reproducing tiie homely diction of old popular minstrelsy, 
Coleridge's art was nicer than Scott's and more perfect 
at every point. How skilfully studied, e.g., is the sim- 
plicity of the following: 

"The moving moon went up the sky 
And nowhere did abide : 
Softly she was going tip.'" 

"Day after day, day after day 
We stuck. " 

"The naive artlessness of the Middle Ages," says 
Brandi, " became in the hands of the Romantic school, 
an intentional form of art." The impression of antiquity 
is heightened by the marginal gloss which the poet added 
in later editions, composed in a prose that has a quaint 
beauty of its own, in its mention of " the creatures of the 
calm " ; its citation of " the learned Jew Josephus and the 
Platonic Constantinopilitan, Michael Psellus," as au- 
thorities on invisible spirits; and in passages like that 
Dantesque one which tells how the mariner " in his lone- 
liness and fixedness yearneth towards the journeying 
moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move on- 
wards; and everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and 

* "With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, 
We could not laugh nor wail," etc. 

"With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, 
Agape they heard me call," etc. 

"Are those her sails that glance in the sun 
Like restless gossamers? 
Are those her ribs, " etc. 

Cf. "Christabel": 

"Is the night chilly and dark? 
The night is chilly, but not dark." 

And see vol. i., p. 271. 



1$ <iA History of English '^manticism. 

is their appointed rest, and their native country, and 
their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, 
as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a 
silent joy at their arrival." 

In "The Ancient Mariner" there are present in the 
highest degree the mystery, indefiniteness, and strange- 
ness which are the marks of romantic art. The period 
is not strictly mediagval, for mariners in the Middle Ages 
did not sail to the south polar regions or lie becalmed 
in the equatorial seas. But the whole atmosphere of the 
poem is mediaeval. The Catholic idea of penance or ex- 
piation is the moral theme enwrought with the story. The 
hermit who shrives the mariner, and the little vesper bell 
which biddeth him to prayer are Catholic touches, and so 
are the numerous pious oaths and ejaculations: 

" By him who died on cross " : 

" Heaven's mother send us grace " : 

"The very deep did rot. O Christ 
Tliat ever this should be ! " 

The albatross is hung about the mariner's neck instead 
of the crucifix, and drops off only when he blesses the 
creatures of the calm and is able to pray. The sleep 
which refreshes him is sent by " Mary Queen " from 
heaven. The cross-bow with which he shoots the bird is 
a mediaeval property. The loud bassoon and the bride's 
garden bower and the procession of merry minstrels who 
go nodding their heads before her are straight out of the 
old land of balladry. One cannot fancy the wedding 
guest dressed otherwise than in doublet and hose, and 
perhaps wearing those marvellous pointed shoes and 
hanging sleeves which are shown in miniature paintings 
of the fifteenth century. And it is thus that illustrators 



Coleridge, 'Bowles, and the Tope Controversy. 77 

of the poem have depicted him. Place is equally indefi- 
nite with time. What port the ill-fated ship cleared from 
we do not know or seek to know ; only the use of the 
word /7'r>^' implies that it was somewhere in "the north 
countree " — the proper home of ballad poetry. 

Coleridge's romances were very differently conceived 
from Scott's. He wove them out of " such stuff as 
dreams are made on." Industrious commentators have 
indeed traced features of "The Ancient Mariner" to 
various sources. Coleridge's friend, Mr. Cruikshank. 
had a dream of a skeleton ship. Wordsworth told him 
the incident, which he read in Shelvocke's voyages, of a 
certain Captain Simon Hatley who shot a black albatross 
south of Terra del Fuego, in hopes that its death might 
bring fair weather. Brandl thinks that the wedding ban- 
quet in Monk Lewis' " Alonzo the Brave and the Fair 
Imogene," furnished a hint; and surmises — what seems 
unlikely — that Coleridge had read a certain epistle by 
Paulinus, a bishop of the fourth century, describing a 
vessel which came ashore on the coast of Lucania with 
only one sailor on board, who reported that the ship had 
been deserted, as a wreck, by the rest of the crew, and 
had since been navigated by spirits. 

But all this is nothing and less than nothing. "The 
Ancient Mariner" is the baseless fabric of a vision. We 
are put under a spell, like the wedding guest, and carried 
off to the isolation and remoteness of mid-ocean. Through 
the chinks of the narrative, the wedding music sounds 
unreal and far off. What may not happen to a man alone 
on a wide, wide sea? The line between earthly and un- 
earthly vanishes. Did the mariner really see the spec- 
tral bark and hear spirits talking, or was it all but the 



78 <iA History of English l^omanticistn. 

phantasmagoria ofc the calenture, the fever which attacks 
the sailor on the tropic main, so that he seems to see 
green meadows and water brooks on the level brine? No 
one can tell ; for he is himself the only witness, and the 
ship is sunk at the harbour mouth. One conjectures that 
no wreckers or divers will ever bring it to the top again. 
Nay, was not the mariner, too, a spectre? Now he is 
gone, and what was all this that he told me, thinks the 
wedding guest, as he rises on the morrow morn. Or did 
he tell me, or did I only dream it? A light shadow cast 
by some invisible thing swiftly traverses the sunny face 
of nature and is gone. Did we see it, or imagine it? 
Even so elusive, so uncertain, so shadowy and phantom- 
like is the spiriting of this wonderful poem. "Poetry," 
says Coleridge, " gives most pleasure when only gener- 
ally and not perfectly understood. It was so by me with 
Gray's ' Bard ' and Collins' odes. * The Bard' once in- 
toxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure." * 
There is no danger that his own poem will ever lose its 
attractiveness in this way. Something inexplicable will 
remain to tease us, like the white Pater Noster and St. 
Peter's sister in Chaucer's night-spell.t 

*"Anima Poetae," 1895, p. 5. This recent collection of 
marginalia has an equal interest with Coleridge's well-known 
"Table Talk." It is the English equivalent of Hawthorne's 
"American Note Books, "full of analogies, images, and re- 
flections — topics and suggestions for possible development 
in future romances and poems. In particular it shows an 
abiding prepossession with the psj'chology of dreams, appa- 
ritions, and mental illusions of all sorts. 

f " Jesu Crist and Seint Benedight 

Blisse this hous fi-om every wicked wight. 
Fro the nightes mare, the white Pater Noster ; 
Where wonest thou, Seint Peter's suster. " 

—"The Miller's Tale." 



Coleridge, 'Bowles, and the Tope Controversy. 79 

Pater subtly connects Coleridge's poetic method with 
his philosophical idealism. "The too palpable intruders 
from a spiritual world, in almost all ghost literature, in 
Scott and Shakespeare even, have a kind of coarseness 
or crudeness. . . . ' The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ' 
has the plausibility, the perfect adaptation to reason and 
life, which belongs to the marvellous, when actually pre- 
sented as part of a credible experience in our dreams. 
. . . The spectral object, so crude, so impossible, has 
become plausible, as ' the spot upon the brain that will 
show itself without,' and is understood to be but a condi- 
tion of one's own mind, for which — according to the scep- 
ticism latent at least in so much of our modern philos- 
ophy — the so-called real things themselves are but spectra 
after all. It is this finer, more delicately marvellous 
supernaturalism, the fruit of his more delicate psychol- 
ogy, which Coleridge infuses into romantic narrative, itself 
also then a new or revived thing in English literature; 
and with a fineness of weird effect in ' The Ancient Mar- 
iner ' unknown in those old, more simple, romantic legends 
and ballads. It is a flower of mediasval, or later German 
romance, growing up in the peculiarly compounded atmos- 
phere of modern psychological speculation, and putting 
forth in it wholly new qualities." 

In " The Ancient Mariner," as in most purely romantic 
poetry, the appeal is more to the imagination than to the 
heart or the conscience. Mrs. Barbauld complained that 
it was improbable and had no moral. Coleridge ad- 
mitted its improbability, but said that it had too much 
moral ; that, artistically speaking, it should have had no 
more moral than a fairy tale. The lesson of course is 
that of kindness to animals — "He prayeth well who lov- 



8o t/1 History of English l^omanticism. 

eth well," etc. But the punishment of the mariner, and 
still more of the mariner's messmates, is so out of pro- 
portion to the gravity of the offence as to be slightly 
ludicrous when stated by Leslie Stephen thus: "People 
who approve of the unnecessary killing of an albatross 
will die a lingering death by starvation." The moral, as 
might be guessed, was foisted upon the poem by Words- 
worth, and is identical with that of " Hart-Leap Well." 
Wordsworth and Coleridge started to write "The An- 
cient Mariner" jointly; and two or three lines in the 
poem, as it stands, were contributed by Wordsworth. But 
he wanted to give the mariner himself " character and 
profession"; and to have the dead seamen come to life 
and sail the ship into port; and in other ways laid so 
heavy a hand upon Coleridge's airy creation that it be- 
came plain that a partnership on these terms was out of 
the question, and Wordsworth withdrew altogether. If 
we must look for spiritual sustenence in the poem, we 
shall find it perhaps not so much in any definite warning 
against cruelty to creatures, as in the sentiment of the 
blessedness of human companionship and the omnipres- 
ence of God's mercy; in the passage, e.g., 

"O wedding guest ! this soul hath been 
Alone on a wide, wide sea," etc. — 

where the thought is the same as in Cowper's " Soliloquy 
of Alexander Selkirk," even to the detail of the " church- 
going bell." 

The first part of " Christabel " wa«; written in 1797; 
the second in 1800; and the poem, in its unfinished state, 
was given to the press in 18 16. Meanwhile it had be- 
come widely known in manuscript. Coleridge used to 



Coleridge, Bowles, and the 'Pope Controversy. 8 1 

read it to literary circles, and copies of it had got about. 
We have seen its influence upon Scott. Byron too ad- 
mired it greatly, and it was by his persuasion that Cole- 
ridge finally published it as a fragment, finding himself 
unable to complete it, and feeling doubtless that the 
public regarded him much as the urchins in Keats' poem 
regarded the crone 

" Who keepeth close a wondrous riddle book, 
As spectacled she sits in chimney nook." 

" Christabel " is more distinctly mediaeval than " The 
Ancient Mariner," and is full of Gothic elements: a 
moated castle, with its tourney court and its great gate 

. . . "ironed within and without, 
Where an army in battle array had marched out " : 

a feudal baron with a retinue of harpers, heralds, and 
pages; a lady who steals out at midnight into the moon- 
lit oak wood, to pray for her betrothed knight; a sorceress 
who pretends to have been carried off on a white palfrey 
by five armed men, and who puts a spell upon the 
maiden. 

If "The Ancient Mariner" is a ballad, "Christabel" 
is, in form, a roman d^aventures, or metrical chivalry tale, 
written in variations of the octosyllabic couplet. These 
variations, Coleridge said, were not introduced wantonly 
but " in correspondence with some transition, in the na- 
ture of the imagery or passion," A single passage will 
illustrate this: 

" They passed the hall that echoes still, 
Pass as lightly as you will. 
The brands were flat, the brands were dying 
Amid their own white ashes lying; 



82 <^ History of English %omanticism. 

But when the lady passed, there came 

A tongue of light, a fit of flame ; 

And Christabel saw the lady's eye. 

And nothing else saw she thereb}', 

Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall. 

Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall. 

O softly tread, said Christabel, 

My father seldom sleepeth well." 

When, after the hurrying anapaests, the verse returns to 
the strict iambic measure in the last couplet, the effect is 
a hush, in harmony with the meaning of the words.* 

" Christabel " is not so unique and perfect a thing as 
"The Ancient Mariner," but it has the same haunting 
charm, and displays the same subtle art in the use of the 
supernatural. Coleridge protested that it " pretended to 
be nothing more than a common fairy tale." f But Lowell 
asserts that it is "tantalising in the suggestion of deeper 
meanings than were ever there." There is, in truth, a 
hint of allegory, like that which baffles and fascinates in 
Christina Rossetti's " Goblin Market " ; a hint so elusive 
that the comparison often made between Geraldine 
and Spenser's Duessa, is distressing to a reader of 
sensitive nerves. That mystery which is a favourite 
weapon in the romanticist armoury is used again here 
with consummate skill. What was it that Christabel 
saw on the lady's bosom? We are left to conjecture. It 
was " a sight to dream of, not to tell," J and the poet 
keeps his secret. Lamb, whose taste was very fine in 
these matters, advised Coleridge never to finish the poem. 
Brandl thinks that the idea was taken from the curtained 

* Vide supra, p. 27. 
\ "Biographia Literaria," chap. xxiv. 

j Keats quotes this line in a letter about Edmund Kean. 
Forman's ed., vol. iii., p. 4. 



Coleridge. Bowles, and the T^ope Controversy, "i-r) 

picture in the "Mysteries of Udolpho"; and he also con- 
siders that the general situation — the castle, the forest, 
the old father and his young daughter, and the strange 
lady — are borrowed from Mrs, Radcliffe's " Romance 
of the Forest " ; and that Burger's " Lenore," Lewis' 
" Alonzo," and some of the Percy ballads contributed a 
detail here and there. But Qiiellenjorschtmgeii of this 
kind are very unimportant. It is more important to note 
the superior art with which the poet excites curiosity and 
suspends — not simply, like Mrs. Radcliffe, postpones — 
the gratification of it to the end, and beyond the end, of 
the poem. Was Geraldine really a witch, or did she only 
seem so to Christabel? The angry moan of the mastiff 
bitch and the tongue of flame that shot up as the lady 
passed — were they omens, or accidents which popular 
superstition interprets into omens? Was the malignant 
influence which Geraldine exerted over the maiden super- 
natural possession, or the fascination of terror and repug- 
nance? Did she really utter the words of a charm, or 
did her sweet bedfellow dream them? And once more, 
what was that upon her breast — " that bosom old- -that 
bosom cold''? Was it a wound, or the mark of a ser- 
pent, or some foul and hideous disfigurement — or was it 
only the shadows cast by the swinging lamp? 

That isolation and remoteness, that preparation of the 
reader's mind for the reception of incredible things, which 
Coleridge secured in " The Ancient Mariner " by cutting 
off his hero from all human life amid the solitude of the 
tropic sea, he here secured— in a less degree, to be sure 
— by the lonely midnight in Sir Leoline's castle. Geral- 
dine and her victim are the only beings awake except 
the hooting owls. There is dim moonlight in the wood. 



84 <t/1 History of English '^manticism. 

dim firelight in the hall, and in Christabel's chamber 
"the silver lamp burns dead and dim." 

The second part of the poem was less successful, partly 
for the reason, as the reviewers pointed out, that it un- 
dertakes the hardest of tasks, " witchery by daylight." 
But there were other reasons. Three years had passed 
since the poem was begun. Coleridge had been to Ger- 
many and had settled at Keswick. The poet had been 
lost in the metaphysician, and he took up his interrupted 
task without inspiration, putting force upon himself. The 
signs of effort are everywhere visible, and it is painfully 
manifest that the poet cannot recover the genial, creative 
mood in which he had set out. In particular it is ob- 
servable that, while there is no mention of place in the 
first part, now we have frequent references to Windermere, 
Borrowdale, Dungeon Ghyll, and other Lake Country 
localities familiar enough in Wordsworth's poetry, but 
strangely out of place in " Christabel." It was certainly 
an artistic mistake to transfer Sir Leoline's castle from 
fairyland to Cumberland.* There is one noble passage 
in the second part, the one which Byron prefixed to his 
" Farewell " to Lady Byron : 

"Alas ! they had been friends in youth," etc. 

But the stress of personal emotion in these lines is not 
irji harmony with the romantic context. They are like a 
patch of cloth of gold let into a lace garment and strain- 
ing the delicate tissue till it tears. 

The example of "The Ancient Mariner," and in a still 
greater degree of " Christabel," was potent upon all sub- 
sequent romantic poetry. It is seen in Scott, in Byron, 

* Vide supra, p. 14. 



Coleridge, ^ozvles, and the T'ope Controversy. 85 

and in Keats, not only in the modelling of their tales, 
but in single lines and images. In the first stanza of the 
" Lay " Scott repeats the line which occurs so often in 
" Christabel "— " Jesu Maria shield her well!" In the 
same poem, the passage where the Lady Margaret steals 
out of Branksome Tower at dawn to meet her lover in the 
wood, gliding down the secret stair and passing the 
bloodhound at the portal, will remind all readers of 
" Christabel." The dialogue between the river and 
mountain spirits will perhaps remind them of the ghostly 
antiphonies which the "Mariner" hears in his trance. 
The couplet 

"The seething pitch and molten lead 
Reeked like a witch's caldron red." 

is, of course, from Coleridge's 

"The water, like a witch's oils, 
Burned green and blue and white." 

In "The Lord of the Isles " Scott describes the "elvish 
lustre " and " livid flakes " of the phosphorescence of the 
sea, and cites, in a note, the description, in "The An- 
cient Mariner," of the sea snakes from which 

"The elvish light 
Fell off in hoary flakes." 

The most direct descendant of " Christabel " was " The 
Eve of St. Agnes." Madeline's chamber, "hushed, 
silken, chaste," recalls inevitably the passage in the 

older poem: 

" The moon shines dim in the open air, 
And not a moonbeam enters here. 
But they withoiit its light can see 
The chamber carved so curiously, 



86 (^ History of English T^omanticism. 

Carved with figures strange and sweet, 
All made out of the carver's brain, 
For a lady's chamber meet : 
The lamp with twofold silver chain 
Is fastened to an angel's feet." 

The rest of Coleridge's ballad work is small in quan- 
tity and may be dismissed briefly. "Alice du Clos" has 
good lines, but is unimportant as a whole. The very 
favourite poem " Love " is a modern story enclosing a 
mediaeval one. In the moonshine by the ruined tower 
the guileless Genevieve leans against the statue of an 
armed man, while her lover sings her a tale of a wan- 
dering knight who bore a burning brand upon his shield 
and went mad for the love of " The Lady of the Land." * 
The fragment entitled " The Dark Ladie " was begun 
as a " sister tale " to " Love." The hero is a " knight 
that wears the griffin for his crest." There are only fif- 
teen stanzas of it, and it breaks off with a picture of an 
imaginary bridal procession, whose "nodding minstrels" 
recall "The Ancient Mariner," and incidentally some 
things of Chatterton's. Lines of a specifically romantic 
colouring are of course to be found scattered about nearly 
everywhere in Coleridge; like the musical little song that 
follows the invocation to the soul of Alvar in " Remorse " : 

"And at evening evermore, 
In a chapel on the shore, 
Shall the chanters sad and saintly — 
Yellow tapers burning faintly — 
Doleful masses chant for thee, 
Miser e7-e Do7nine ! " 

* Brandl thinks that this furnished Keats with a hint or two 
for his "Belle Dame sans Merci. " Coleridge's "Dejection: 
An Ode " is headed with a stanza from "the grand old ballad 
of Sir Patrick Spence." 



Coleridge, T3owles, and the Tope Controversy. 87 

or the wild touch of folk poesy in that marvellous opium 
dream, " Kubla Khan " — the " deep romantic chasm " : 

"A savage place, as holy and enchanted 
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted 
By woman wailing for her demon lover." 

Or the well-known ending of "The Knight's Grave": 

"The knight's bones are dust, 
And his good sword rust ; 
His soul is with the saints, I trust." 

In taking account of Coleridge's services to the cause 
of romanticism, his critical writings should not be over- 
looked. Matthew Arnold declared that there was some- 
thing premature about the burst of creative activity in 
English literature at the opening of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, and regretted that the way had not been prepared, 
as in Germany, by a critical movement. It is true that 
the English romantics put forth no body of doctrine, no 
authoritative statement of a theory of literary art. Scott 
did not pose as the leader of a school, or compose 
prefaces and lectures like Hugo and Schlegel,* As a 

*"The English Romantic critics did not form a school. 
Like everything else in the English Romantic movement, its 
criticism was individual, isolated, sporadic, unsystematised. 
It had no oflficial mouthpiece, like Sainte-Beuve and the 
Globe; its members formed no compact phalanx like that 
which, towards the close of our period, threw itself upon the 
'classiques' of Paris. Nor did they, with the one exception of 
Coleridge, approach the Romantic critics of Germany in range 
of ideas, in grasp of the larger signiiicance of their own move- 
ment. It was only in Germany that the ideas implicit in the 
great poetic revival were explicitly thought out in all their 
manj'-sided bearing upon society, history, philosophy, relig- 
ion ; and that the pioblem of criticism, in particular, was pre- 
sented in its full depth and richness of meaning. . . . As 
English Romanticism achieved greater things on its creative 
than on its critical side, so its criticism was more remarkable 



88 zA History of English l^manticistn. 

contributor to the reviews on his favourite topics, he was 
no despicable critic; shrewd, good-natured, full of spe- 
cial knowledge, anecdote, and illustration. But his crit- 
icism was never polemic, and he had no quarrel with the 
classics. He cherished an unfeigned admiration for 
Dryden, whose life he wrote and whose works he 
edited. Doubtless he would cheerfully have admitted the 
inferiority of his own poetry to Dryden's and Pope's. 
He had no programme to announce, but just went ahead 
writing romances; in practice an innovator, but in theory 
a literary conservative. 

Coleridge, however, was fully aware of the scope of the 
new movement. He represented, theoretically as well 
as practically, the reaction against eighteenth-century 
academicism, the Popean tradition* in poetry, and the 
maxims of pseudo-classical criticism. In his analysis 
and vindication of the principles of romantic art, he 
brought to bear a philosophic depth and subtlety such as 
had never before been applied in England to a merely 
belletristic subject. He revolutionised, for one thing, the 
critical view of Shakspere, devoting several lecture 
courses to the exposition of the thesis that " Shak- 
spere's judgment was commensurate with his genius." 
These lectures borrowed a number of passages from A. 
W, von Schlegel's " Vorlesungen iiber Dramatische Kunst 



on that side which is akin to creation — in the subtle apprecia- 
tion of literary quality — than in the analysis of the principles 
on which its appreciation was founded " (C. H. Herford : 
"The Age of Wordsworth," p. 50). 

* See "Biographia Literaria," chap. i. "From the com- 
mon opinion that the English style attained its greatest per- 
fection in and about Queen Anne's reign, I altogether dis- 
sent " (Lecture "Ou Style," March 13, 1S18). 



Coleridge, "Bowles, and the Tope Controversy. 89 

und Litteratur," delivered at Vienna in 1808, but en- 
grafted with original matter of the highest value. Com- 
pared with these Shakspere notes, with the chapters on 
Wordsworth in the " Biographia Literaria," and with the 
obiter dicta sown through Coleridge's prose, all previous 
English criticism appears crude and superficial, and the 
contemporary squabble over Pope like a scolding match 
in the nursery. 

Coleridge's acute and sympathetic insight into the 
principles of Shaksperian drama did not save him from 
producing his abortive "Zapolya" in avowed imitation 
of the "Winter's Tale." What curse is on the English 
stage that men who have done work of the highest grade 
in other departments, as soon as they essay playwriting, 
become capable of failures like "The Borderers" and 
"John Woodville" and "Manfred" and "Zapolya"? 
As for " Remorse," with its Moorish sea-coasts, wild 
mountains, chapel interiors with painted windows, torch- 
light and moonlight, dripping caverns, dungeons, daggers 
and poisoned goblets, the best that can be said of it is 
that it is less bad than "Zapolya." And of both it may 
be said that they are romantic not after the fashion of 
Shakspere, but of those very German melodramas which 
Coleridge ridiculed in his " Critique on Bertram." * 

* See vol. i., p. 421 ff. 



CHAPTER III. 

•Reats, Xelgb Ibimt, an& tbe Dante IRevival. 

In the interchange of literary wares between England 
and Germany during the last years of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, it is observable that the English romantics went no 
further back than to their own contemporaries for their 
knowledge of the Deutsche Vergangenheit. They trans- 
lated or imitated robber tragedies, chivalry tales, and 
ghost ballads from the modern restorers of the Teutonic 
Mittelalter ; but they made no draughts upon the original 
storehouse of German mediaeval poetry. There was no 
such reciprocity as yet between England and the Latin 
countries. French romanticism dates, at the earliest, 
from Chateaubriand's "Ge'nie du Christianisme" (1802), 
and hardly made itself felt as a definite force, even in 
France, before Victor Hugo's "Cromwell" (1828). But 
in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Italy, Spain, 
and France began to contribute material to the English 
movement in the shape of translations like Gary's " Di- 
vine Comedy" (1814); Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads" 
(1824) ; Southey's " Amadis of Gaul " (1803), " Palmerin 
of England" (1807), and "The Chronicle of the Cid" 
(1808); and Rose's* " Partenopex of Blois" (1807). 
By far the most influential of these was Gary's " Dante." 

* Scott's friend, William Stewart Rose — to whom the first 
verse epistle in " Marmion " is addressed. He also translated 
the "Orlando Furioso" (1823-31). His "Partenopex" was 
made from a version in modern French. 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the Tfante Revival. 91 

Hitherto the Italian Middle Age had impressed itself 
upon the English imagination not directly but through 
the richly composite art of the Renaissance schools of 
painting and poetry; through Raphael and his followers; 
through the romances of Ariosto and Tasso and their 
English scholar, Spenser. Elizabethan England had been 
supplied with versions of the "Orlando Furioso"* and 
the " Gierusalemme Liberata," by Harrington and Fair- 
fax — the latter still a standard translation and a very ac- 
complished piece of versification. Warton and Hurd and 
other romanticising critics of the eighteenth century were 
perpetually upholding Ariosto and Tasso against French 
detraction : 

"In face of all his foes, the Cruscan quire, 
And Boileau, whose rash envy could allow 
No strain which shamed his country's creaking lyre, 
That whetstone of the teeth — monotony in wire ! " f 

Scott's eager championship of Ariosto has already been 
mentioned. J But the stuff of the old Charlemagne epos is 
sophisticated in the brilliant pages of Ariosto, who 
follows Pulci and Boiardo, if not in burlesquing chivalry 
outright, yet in treating it with a half irony. Tasso is 
serious, but submits his romantic matter — Godfrey of 
Boulogne and the First Crusade — to the classical epic 
mould. It was pollen from Italy, but not Italy of the 
Middle Ages, that fructified English poetry in the six- 

* A new translation of the "Orlando," by Hoole, appeared 
in 1773-83 ; of Tasso's "Jerusalem " in 1763 ; and of Metasta- 
sio's dramas in 1767. These were in the heroic couplets of 
Pope. 

f "Childe Harold," Canto iv., xxxviii. And Cf. vol. i., pp. 
25, 49, 100, 170, 219, 222-26. 

X Vide supra, p. 5. 



92 z/1 History of English l^manticism. 

teenth century. Two indeed of g/i a7itichi, "the all 
Etruscan three," communicated an impulse both earlier 
and later. Love sonneteering, in emulation of Petrarca, 
began at Henry VIII.'s court. Chaucer took the sub- 
stance of "Troilus and Creseyde" and "The Knightes 
Tale" from Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and "Teseide"; 
and Dryden, who never mentions Dante, versified three 
stories from the " Decameron." But Petrarch and 
Boccaccio were not mediaeval minds. They represent the 
earlier stages of humanism and the new learning. Dante 
was the genuine ho^nme du moyen age, and Dante was 
the latest of the great revivals. " Dante," says Carlyle, 
"was the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the thought 
they lived by stands here in everlasting music." 

The difficulty, not to say obscurity, of the " Divine 
Comedy"; its allusive, elliptical style; its scholasticism 
and allegorical method; its multitudinous references to 
local politics and the history of thirteenth-century Italy, 
defied approach. Above all, its profound, austere, mys- 
tical spirituality was abhorrent to the clear, shallow 
rationalism of the eighteenth century, as well as to the 
religious liberalism of the seventeenth and the joyous 
sensuality of the sixteenth. Goethe the pagan disliked 
Dante, no less than Scott the Protestant.* In particular, 
deistic France, arbiter elega?itiarum, felt with a shiver of 
repulsion, 

" How grim the master was of Tuscan song." 

"I estimate highly," wrote Voltaire to an Italian cor- 
respondent, " the courage with which you have dared to 

* Vide supra, p. 40. Goethe pronounced the " Inferno " 
abominable, the "Purgatorio " doubtful, and the "Paradiso " 
tiresome (Plumptre's "Dante," London, 1887, vol. ii., p. 484)' 



Keats, Leigh Hmit, and the T>ante 'T{evival. 93 

say that Dante was a madman * and his work a monster, 
. . . There are found among us and in the eighteenth 
century, people who strive to admire imaginations so 
stupid and barbarous." A French translation of the 
"Divine Comedy" had been printed by the Abbe Gran- 
gierf at Paris in 1596; but Rivarol, whose "Inferno" 
was published in 1783, was the first Frenchman, says 
Lowell, to divine Dante's greatness. The earliest Ger- 
man version was Bachenschwanz's prose translation of 
the "Commedia" (Leipsic, 1767-69),! but the German 
romantic school were the first to furnish a sympathetic 
interpretation of Dante to their countrymen. 

Chaucer was well acquainted with the work of " the 
grete poet of Florence," and drew upon him occasionally, 
though by no means so freely as upon Boccaccio. Thus 
in "The Menkes Tale" he re-tells, in a very inferior 
fashion, the tragedy of Ugolino. In "The Parliament of 
Foules " and " The Hous of Fame " there are distinct 
imitations of Dante. A passage from the " Purgatory " 
is quoted in the " Wif of Bathes Tale," etc. Spenser 
probably, and Milton certainly, knew their Dante. Mil- 
ton's sonnet to Henry Lawes mentions Dante's en- 
counter with the musician Casella " in the milder shades 
of Purgatory." Here and there a reference to the " Di- 
vine Comedy " occurs in some seventeenth-century Eng- 
lish prose writer like Sir Thomas Browne or Jeremy Tay- 
lor. It is thought that the description of Hell in 
Sackville's "Mirror for Magistrates" shows an acquaint- 

* See Walpole's opinion, vol. i., p. 235. 

f For early manuscript renderings see " Les Plus Anciennes 
Traductions Frangaisesde la Divine Comedie, " par C. Morel, 
Paris, i8q7. 

$ Lowell says Kannegiesser's, 1809. 



94 =^ History of English 'T^omanticism. 

ance with the " Inferno." But Dante had few readers in 
England before the nineteenth century. He was prac- 
tically unknown there and in all of Europe outside of 
Italy, "His reputation," said Voltaire, "will go on in- 
creasing because scarce anybody reads him." And half 
a century later Napoleon said the same thing in the same 
words: "His fame is increasing and will continue to in- 
crease because no one ever reads him." 

In the third volume of his " History of English Poetry " 
(1781), Thomas Warton had spoken of the "Divine Com- 
edy " as " this wonderful compound of classical and ro- 
mantic fancy, of pagan and Christian theology, of real 
and fictitious history, of tragical and comic incidents, of 
familiar and heroic manners, and of satirical and sub- 
lime poetry. But the grossest improprieties of this poem 
discover an originality of invention, and its absurdities 
often border on sublimity. We are surprised that a poet 
should write one hundred cantos on hell, paradise, and 
purgatory. But this prolixity is partly owing to the want 
of art and method, and is common to all early com- 
positions, in which everything is related circumstantially 
and without rejection, and not in those general terms 
which are used by modern writers." Warton is shocked 
at Dante's "disgusting fooleries" and censures his de- 
parture from Virgilian grace. Milton "avoided the 
childish or ludicrous excesses of these bold inventions 
. . . but rude and early poets describe everything." But 
Warton felt Dante's greatness. " Hell," he wrote, 
"grows darker at his frown." He singled out for special 
mention the Francesca and Ugolino episodes. 

If Warton could write thus it is not surprising to dis- 
cover among classical critics either a total silence as to 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the "Dante 'T^evival. 95 

Dante, or else a systematic depreciation. Addison does 
not mention him in his Italian travels; and in his "Sat- 
urday papers " misses the very obvious chance for a com- 
parison between Dante and Milton such as Macaulay 
afterwards elaborated in his essay on Milton. Gold- 
smith, who knew nothing of Dante at first hand, wrote 
of him with the usual patronising ignorance of eighteenth- 
century criticism as to anything outside of the Greek 
and Latin classics: "He addressed a barbarous people 
in a method suited to their apprehension; united purga- 
tory and the river Styx, St. Paul and Virgil, heaven 
and hell together; and shows a strange mixture of good 
sense and absurdity. The truth is, he owes most of his 
reputation to the obscurity of the times in which he 
lived." * 

In 1782, William Hayley, the biographer of Cowper 
and author of that very mild poem "The Triumphs of 
Temper," published a verse " Essay on Epic Poetry " 
in five epistles. In his notes to the third epistle, he 
gave an outline of Dante's life with a translation of 
his sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti and of the first three can- 
tos of the " Inferno." " Voltaire," he says, has spoken 
of Dante " with that precipitate vivacity which so fre- 
quently led the lively Frenchman to insult the reputation 
of the noblest writers." He refers to the "judicious and 
spirited summary " of the " Divine Comedy " in Warton, 
and adds, " We have several versions of the celebrated 
story of Ugolino; but I believe no entire canto of Dante 
has hitherto appeared in our language. . . . The author 
has been solicited to execute an entire translation of 
Dante, but the extreme inequality of this poet would render 
*" Present State of Polite Learning " (1759). 



96 tA History of Enj^lisb l^manticism. 

such a work a very laborious undertaking; and it appears 
very doubtful how far such a version would interest our 
country. Perhaps the reception of these cantos may dis- 
cover to the translator the sentiments of the public." 
Hayley adopted "triple rhyme," i.e., the terza rima, and 
said that he did not recollect it had ever been used 
before in English. His translation is by no means con- 
temptible — much better than Boyd's, — but fails entirely 
to catch Dante's manner or to keep the strange precision 
and picturesqueness of his phrase. Thus he renders 

" Chi per hmgo silenzio parea fioco, " 

" Whose voice was like the whisper of a lute " ; 

and the poet is made to address Beatrice — O donna di 
virtu — as " bright fair," as if she were one of the belles 
in "The Rape of the Lock." In this same year aversion 
of the " Inferno " was printed privately and anonymously 
by Charles Rogers, a book and art collector and a friend 
of Sir Joshua Reynolds, But the first complete transla- 
tion of the "Comedy" into English was made by Henry 
Boyd, a clergyman of the Irish Church; the "Inferno" 
in 1785 (with a specimen from Ariosto) ; the whole in 
1802. Boyd was a quite obscure person, author among 
other things of a Spenserian poem entitled " The Wood- 
man's Tale," and his translation attracted little notice. 
In his introduction he compares Dante with Homer, and 
complains that " the venerable old bard . . . has been 
long neglected " ; perhaps, he suggests, because his poem 
could not be tried by Aristotle's rules or submitted to the 
usual classical tests. 

"Since the French, the restorers of the art of criticism, 
cast a damp upon original invention, the character of 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the IDante 'T^evival. 97 

Dante has been thrown under a deeper shade. That 
agreeable and volatile nation found in themselves an 
insuperable aversion to the gloomy and romantic bard, 
whose genius, ardent, melancholy, and sublime, was so 
different from their own." 

Boyd used a six-lined stanza, a singularly ill chosen 
medium for rendering the terza rima ; and his diction 
was as wordy and vague as Dante's is concise and sharp 
of edge. A single passage will illustrate his manner: 

"So full the symphony of grief arose, 
My heart, responsive to tiie lovers' woes, 

With thrilling sympathy convulsed my breast. 
Too strong at last for life my passion grew, 
And, sickening at the lamentable view, 

I fell like one by mortal pangs oppressed." * 

The first opportunity which the mere English reader 
had to form any real notion of Dante, was afforded by 
Henry Francis Gary's translation in blank verse (the 
"Inferno," with the Italian text in 1805; the entire 
"Commedia" in 1814, with the title "The Vision of 
Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise"). This was a work of 
talent, if not of genius; and in spite of the numerous 
versions in prose and verse that have since appeared, it 
continues the most current and standard Dante in Eng- 
land, if not in America, where Longfellow naturally 
challenges precedence. The public was as yet so un- 
prepared to appreciate Dante that Gary's work received 
little attention until brought into notice by Goleridge; 
and the translator was deeply chagrined by the indiffer- 

* " Mentre che I'uno spirto questo disse, 
L'altro piangeva si, che di pietade 
I venni men, cosi com' io morisse ; 
E cadde come corpo morte cade." 

— " Inferno, " Canto v. 



98 <tA History of English %omanticism. 

ence, not to say hostility, with which his labours were 
acknowledged. In the memoir * of Gary by his son there 
is a letter from Anne Seward — the Swan of Lichfield — 
which throws a singular light upon the critical taste of 
the "snug coterie and literary lady" of the period. She 
writes : " How can you profess to be charmed with the 
few faint outlines of landscape painting in Dante, who 
are blind to the beautiful, distinct, and profuse scenery 
in the pages of Ossian?" She goes on to complain 
that the poem, in its English dress, is vulgar and obscure. 
Coleridge devoted to Dante a part of his series of lec- 
tures given at London in 1818, reading copious selections 
from Gary's version. The translator had claimed, in his 
introduction, that the Florentine poet " leaves to Homer 
and Shakespeare alone the power of challenging the pre- 
eminence or equality." Goleridge emphasized the "end- 
less, subtle beauties of Dante"; the vividness, logical 
connection, strength, and energy of his style. In this he 
pronounced him superior to Milton; and in picturesque- 
ness he affirmed that he surpassed all other poets ancient 
or modern. With characteristic penetration he indicated 
the precise position of Dante in mediaeval literature; his 
poetry is "the link between religion and philosophy"; 
it is "christianized, but without the further Gothic acces- 
sion of proper chivalry"; it has that "inwardness which 
. . . distinguishes all the classic from all the modern 
poetry." It was perhaps in consequence of Goleridge's 
praise that Gary's translation went into its second edition 
in 18 19, the year following this lecture course, A third 
was published in 183 1. Italians used to complain that 
the foreign reader's knowledge of the " Divine Gomedy " 
* Vol. i., p. 236. 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the IDante l^evival. 99 

was limited to the " Inferno," and generally to the Ugolino 
and Francesca passages. Coleridge's quotations are all 
from the "Inferno," and Lowell thinks that he had not 
read beyond it. He testified that the Ugolino and Fran- 
cesca stories were already "so well known and admired 
that it would be pedantry to analyse them." Sir Joshua 
Reynolds had made a painting of the former subject. In 
1800 William Blake produced a series of seven engrav- 
ings in illustration of the "Inferno." In 1817 Flaxman 
began his illustrations of the whole "Commedia," ex- 
tending to a hundred plates.* 

In 1819-20 Byron was living at Ravenna, the place of 
Dante's death and burial f and of the last years of his 
exile. He used to ride for hours together through Ra- 
venna's " immemorial wood," X and the associations of 
the scene prompted him to put into English (March, 1820) 
the Francesca episode, that " thing woven as out of rain- 
bows on a ground of eternal black." In the letter to 
Murray, sent with his translation, he wrote: "Enclosed 
you will find, line for line, in third rhyme {terza rifua), 
of which your British blackguard reader as yet under- 
stands nothing, Fanny of Rimini. You know that she 
was born here, and married and slain, from Gary, Boyd, 
and such people." In his diary, Byron commented scorn- 
fully on Frederick Schlegel's assertions that Dante had 
never been a favourite with his own countrymen; and 

* Plumptre's "Dante," vol. ii., p. 439. 

f "Ungrateful Florence ! Dante sleeps afar, 

Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore." 

— "Childe Harold," iv., 57. 
X See vol. i., p. 49 ; and " Purgatorio, " xxviii., 19-20. 

"Tal, qual di ramo in ramo si raccoglie 
Per la pineta in sui lito di Chiassi." 



loo <i/l History of English 'T^manticism. 

that his main defect was a want of gentle feelings. " JVof 
a favourite! Why they talk Dante — write Dante — and 
think and dream Dante at this moment (1821) to an ex- 
cess which would be ridiculous, but that he deserves it. 
. . . Of gentle feelings! — and Francesca of Rimini — and 
the father's feelings in Ugolino — and Beatrice — and ' La 
Pia ' ! Why there is a gentleness in Dante beyond all 
gentleness." Byron had not the patience to be a good 
translator. His rendering is closer and, of course, more 
spirited than Hayley's; but where long search for the 
right word was needed, and a delicate shading of phrase 
to reproduce without loss the meaning of this most mean- 
ing and least translatable of masters, Byron's work shows 
haste and imperfection. 

" Love, who to none beloved to love again 

Remits." 

is neither an idiomatic nor in any way an adequate eng- 
lishing of 

"Amor, che a nuUo amato amar perdona." 

Nor does 

"Accursed was the book and he who wrote," 

fully give the force of the famous 

"Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse." * 

The year before Byron had composed "The Prophecy of 
Dante," an original poem in four cantos, in terza rima, 

* He did better in free paraphrase than in literal transla- 
tion. Cf. Stanza cviii., in "Don Juan," Canto iii. — 

"Soft hour ! which wakes the wish and melts the heart " — 

with its original in the " Purgatorio, " viii., 1-6. 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the 'Dante l^evtval. loi 

"... imitative rhyme, 
Harsh Runic copy of the South 's sublime." * 

The poem foretells " the fortunes of Italy in the ensuing 
centuries," and is a rheotorical piece, diffuse and de- 
clamatory, and therein quite the opposite of Dante. It 
manifests Byron's self-conscious habit of submitting his 
theme to himself, instead of losing himself in his theme. 
I/e is Dante in exile, and Gemma Donati is Lady Byron — 

"That fatal she, 
Their mother, the cold partner who hath brought 
Destruction for a dowry — this to see 
And feel and know without repair, hath taught 
A bitter lesson ; but it leaves me free : 
I have not vilely found nor basely sought. 
They made an exile not a slave of me." 

Dante's bitter and proud defiance found a response in 
Byron's nature, but his spirit, as a whole, the English 
poet was not well fitted to interpret. In the preface to 
" The Prophecy," Byron said that he had not seen the 
ferza rbna tried before in English, except by Hayley, 
whose translation he knew only from an extract in the 
notes to Beckford's " Vathek." 

Shelley's kn owledge and appreciation of Dante might 
be proved from isolated images and expressions in many 
parts of his writings. He translated the sonnet to Guido 
Cavalcanti with greater freedom and elegance than Hay- 
ley, and wrote a short copy of verses on the Hunger 
Tower at Pisa, the scene of Ugolino's sufferings. In the 
preface to " Epipsychidion " he cites the " Vita Nuova " 
as^e utterance of an idealised and spiritualised love 
l ike that which his own poem records. In the "Defence 
QtPo_etry"he pays a glowing tribute_Jo._Dante_ as the 

* Dedication to La Guiccioli. 



I02 <i/l History of English l^manticism. 

second of epic poets and " the first awakener of entranced 
Europe." His poetry is the bridge "which unites the 
modern and the ancient world." Contrary to the prevail- 
ing critical tradition, Shelley preferred the "Purgatory" 
and the "Paradise "to the "Hell." Shelley also em- 
ployed ^erza rima in his fragmentary pieces, " Prince 
Athanase," "The Triumph of Life," "The Woodman and 
the Nightingale," and in one of his best lyrics, the "Ode 
to the West Wind," * written in 1819 "in a wood that 
skirts the Arno, near Florence." This linked measure, 
so difficult for the translator and which gives a hampered 
movement to Byron's and Hayley's specimens of the " In- 
ferno," Shelley may be said to have really domesticated 
in English verse by his splendid handling of it in orig- 
inal work: 

" Make me thy lyre even as the forest is : 
What if my leaves are falling, like its own? 
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies 
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, 
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce, 
My spirit ! Be thou me, impetuous one ! " 

Shelley expressed to Medwin his dissatisfaction with 
all English renderings from Dante — even with Gary — and 
announced his intention, or desire, to translate the whole 
of the " Divine Comedy " in terza rima. Two specimens 
of this projected version he gave in "Ugolino," and 
"Matilda Gathering Flowers" ("Purg.," xxviii., 1-5 1). 
He also made a translation of the first canzone of the 
" Gonvito." 

After the appearance of Gary's version, critical com- 

*But in this poem each thirteenth and fourteenth line make 
a couplet, thus breaking up the whole into a series of loose 
sonnets. 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the T)ante l^vival. 1 03 

prehension of Dante grew rapidly. In the same year 
when Coleridge gave his lectures, Hallam published his 
"Middle Ages," which contained a just though somewhat 
coldly worded estimate of the great Italian. This was 
amplified in his later work, "The Literature of Europe" 
(1838-39). Hallam said that Dante was the first name 
in the literature of the Middle Ages, the creator of his 
nation's poetry, and the most original of all writers, and 
the most concise. But he blamed him for obscurity, 
forced and unnatural turns of expression, and barbarous 
licenses of idiom. The " Paradise " seemed to him tedi- 
ous, as a whole, and much of the " Purgatory " heavy. 
Hallam repeated, if he did not originate that nice bit of 
discernment, that in his " Paradise " Dante uses only 
ihree^l^a^mg ideas — light, music, and motion. Then 
came Macaulay's essay " Milton," in the Edinburgh for 
1825, with the celebrated parallel between the "Divine 
Comedy " and the " Paradise Lost," and the contrast be- 
tween Dante's " picturesque " and Milton's " imaginative " 
method. Macaulay's analysis has been questioned by 
Ruskin and others; some of his positions were perhaps 
mistaken, but they were the most advanced that English 
Dante criticism had as yet taken up. And finally came 
Carlyle's vivid piece of portrait painting in " Hero Wor- 
ship" (1841). The first literal prose translation of any 
extent from the "Commedia" was the "Inferno" by 
Carlyle's brother John (1849). 

Since the middle of the century Dante study and Dante 
literature in English-speaking lands have waxed enor- 
mously. Dante societies have been founded in England 
and America. Almost every year sees another edition, a 
new commentary or a fresh translation in prose, in blank 



104 "^^ History of English l{omanticism. 

verse, in ferza rivia, or in some form of stanza. It is 
not exaggerating to say that there is more public mention 
of Dante now in a single year than in all the years of the 
eighteenth century together. It would be interesting, if 
it were possible, to count the times that Dante's name 
occurs in English writings of the eighteenth and then of 
the nineteenth century; afterwards to do the same with 
Ariosto and Tasso and compare the results. It would be 
found that, while the eighteenth century set no very high 
value on Ariosto and Tasso, it ignored Dante altogether; 
and that the nineteenth has put aside the superficial medi- 
aevalism of the Renaissance romancers and gone back to 
the great religious romancer of the Italian Middle Age. 
There is no surer plummet than Dante's to sound the 
spiritual depth of a time. It is in the nineteenth century 
first that Shakspere and Dante took possession of the 
European mind. In 1800 Shakspere was an English, 
or at most an English and German poet, and Dante 
exclusively an Italian. In 1900 they had both become 
world poets. Shakspere's foreign conquests were the 
earlier and are still the wider, as wide perhaps as the 
expanse — 

"That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne." 

But the ground that Dante has won he holds with equal 
secureness. Not that he will ever be popular, in Shak- 
spere's way; and yet it is far gone when the aesthete in 
a comic opera is described as a '' Francesca da Rimini 
young man." 

As a stimulus to creative work the influence of Dante, 
though not entirely absent, is not conspicuous in the first 
half of the century. It is not until the time of the Ros- 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the T)ante 1{evival. 105 

settis in England and of Longfellow and Dr. Parsons in 
America that any poetry of a really Dantesque inspira- 
tion and, at the same time, of high original value was 
added to our literature.* 

The first fruits of the Dante revival in England, in the 
shape of original production, was Leigh Hunt's "Story 
of Rimini" (1816)— "Mr. Hunt's smutty story of Ri- 
mini," as the Tory wits of Blackwood were fond of calling 
it in their onslaughts upon the Cockney school. This 
was a romaunt in four cantos upon the already familiar 
episode of Francesca, that " lily in the mouth of Tartarus." 
Hunt took Dryden's " Fables " as his model in versifica- 
tion, employing the heroic couplet with the frequent va- 
riation of the triplet and the alexandrine. The poem is 
not at all Dantesque in its lax and fluent sweetness, and 
in that colloquial, familiar manner which is constant in 
all Hunt's writing, both prose and verse; reminding 
one, at its best, of Chaucer, who was, indeed, one of his 
favourite masters. Hunt softens the ferocity of the tale 
as given by Boccaccio, according to whom the husband 
Giovanni Malatesta was a cripple, and killed the lovers 
in flagra7ite delicto. Hunt makes him a personable man, 
though of proud and gloomy temper. He slays his 
brother Paolo in chivalrous fashion and in single combat, 
and Francesca dies of a broken heart. The descriptive 
portions of the " Story of Rimini" are charming: the 



* T. W. Parsons' "Lines on a Bust of Dante" appeared in 
the Boston Advertisei' in 1841. His translation of the first 
ten cantos of the " Inferno" was published in 1843: later in- 
stalments in 1867 and 1893. Longfellow's version of the 
"Divine Comedy" with the series of sonnets by the translator 
came out in 1867-70. For the Dante work of the Rossettis, 
'Vide i7ifra, pp. 282 ff. 



io6 5/7 History of English 'T^pmanticism. 

feudal procession with trumpeters, heralds, squires, and 
knights, sent to escort home the bride; the pine forest 
outside Ravenna; and the garden at Rimini in which the 
lovers used to meet — 

"Places of nestling green for poets made." 

Hunt had a quick eye for colour; a fondness, not al- 
together free from affectation, for dainty phrases; and 
a feminine love of little niceties in dress, tapestry, 
needlework, and furnishings. The poem was written 
mostly in prison where its author spent two years for a 
libel on the Prince Regent. Byron used to visit him 
there and bring him books bearing on Francesca's his- 
tory. Hunt brought into the piece romantic stuff from 
various sources, including a summary of the book which 
betrayed the lovers to their fatal passion, the romance of 
"Lancelot du Lac." And Giovanni speaks to his dying 
brother a paraphrase of the celebrated eulogy pronounced 
over Lancelot by Sir Ector in the " Morte Darthur": 

"And. Paulo, thou wert the completest knight 
That ever rode with banner to the fight ; 
And thou wert the most beautiful to see, 
That ever came in press of chivalry : 
And of a sinful man thou wert the best 
That ever for his friend put spear in rest ; 
And thou wert the most meek and cordial 
That ever among ladies eat in hall ; 
And thou wert still, for all that bosom gored. 
The kindest man that ever struck with sword." 

Hunt makes the husband discover his wife's infidelity 
by overhearing her talking in her sleep. In many other 
particulars he enfeebles, dandifies, and sentimentalises 
Dante's fierce, abrupt tragedy; holding the reader by the 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the Tfante Revival 107 

button while he prattles in his garrulous way of Paulo's 
" taste "— 

"The very nose, lightly yet firmly wrought, 

Showed taste " — 
and of 

"The two divinest things in earthly lot, 

A lovely woman in a rural spot ! " 

a couplet which irresistibly suggests suburban picnics. 

Yet no one in his generation did more than Leigh 
Hunt to familiarise the English public with Italian ro- 
mance. He began the study of Italian when he was a 
schoolboy at Christ Hospital, being attracted to Ariosto 
by a picture of Angelica and Medoro, in West's studio. 
Like his friend Keats, on whose " Eve of St. Agnes " he 
wrote an enthusiastic commentary,* Hunt was eclectic in 
his choice of material, drawing inspiration impartially 
from the classics and the romantics; but, like Keats, he 
became early a declared rebel against eighteenth-century 
traditions and asserted impulse against rule. " In anti- 
quarian corners," he says, in writing of the influences of 
his childish days, "Percy's 'Reliques' were preparing a 
nobler age both in poetry and prose," At school he fell 
passionately in love with Collins and Gray, composed a 
"Winter" in imitation of Thomson, one hundred stanzas 
of a "Fairy King" in emulation of Spenser, and a long 
poem in Latin inspired by Gray's odes and Malet's 
"Northern Antiquities." In 1802 [aetate 18] he pub- 
lished a volume of Xh^'s,^ juvenilia — odes after Collins and 
Gray, blank verse after Thomson and Akenside, and a 
" Palace of Pleasure " after Spenser's " Bower of Bliss." f 

* "The Seer." 

f He named a daughter, born while he was in prison, after 
Spenser's Florimel. 



io8 <iA History of English Romanticism. 

It was in this same year that on a visit to Oxford, he was 
introduced to Kett, the professor of poetry, who expressed 
a hope that the youthful bard might be inspired by "the 
muse of Warton," whom Hunt had never read. There 
had fallen in Hunt's way when he was a young man, 
Bell's edition of the poets, which included Chaucer and 
Spenser. "The omission of these in Cooke's edition," 
he says, " was as unpoetical a sign of the times as the 
present familiarity with their names is the reverse. It 
was thought a mark of good sense; as if good sense, in 
matters of literature, did not consist as much in knowing 
what was poetical poetry, as brilliant wit." Of his 
"Feast of the Poets" (1814) he writes: * "I offended all 
the critics of the old or French school, by objecting to 
the monotony of Pope's versification, and all the critics of 
the new or German school by laughing at Wordsworth." 
In the preface to his collected poems [1832] occurs the 
following interesting testimony to the recentness of the 
new criticism. " So long does fashion succeed in palm- 
ing its petty instincts upon the world for those of a nation 
and of nature, that it is only of late years that the French 
have ceased to think some of the most affecting passages 
in Shakespeare ridiculous. . . . Yet the English them- 
selves, no great while since, half blushed at these criti- 
cisms, and were content if the epithet ' bizarre ' (' 7'ofre 
bizarre Shakespeare ') was allowed to be translated into 
' a wild, irregular genius.' Everything was wild and 
irregular except rhymesters in toupees. A petty con- 
spiracy of decorums took the place of what was becoming 
to humanity." In the summer of 1822 Hunt went by 
sailing vessel through the Mediterranean to Italy. The 
*" Autobiography," p. 200 (ed. of 1870). 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the T>ante l^vival. 109 

books which he read chiefly on board ship were "Don 
Quixote," Ariosto, and Berni; and his diary records 
the emotion with which he coasted the western shores of 
Spain, the ground of Italian romance, where the Pay- 
nim chivalry used to land to go against Charlemagne: 
the scene of Boiardo's " Orlando Inamorato " and Ari- 
osto's " Orlando Furioso." " I confess I looked at these 
shores with a human interest, and could not help feeling 
that the keel of our vessel was crossing a real line, over 
which knights and lovers had passed. And so they 
have, both real and fabulous; the former not less roman- 
tic, the latter scarcely less real. . . . Fair speed your 
sails over the lucid waters, ye lovers, on a lover-like sea! 
Fair speed them, yet never land; for where the poet has 
left you, there ought ye, as ye are, to be living forever — 
forever gliding about a summer sea, touching at its flow- 
ery islands and reposing beneath its moon," 

Hunt's sojourn in Italy, where he lived in close asso- 
ciation with Byron and Shelley, enabled him to preciser 
his knowledge of the Italian language and literature. In 
1846 he published a volume of " Stories from the Italian 
Poets," containing a summary or free paraphrase in prose 
of the "Divine Comedy" and the poems of Pulci, Boi- 
ardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, " with comments throughout, 
occasional passages versified and critical notices of the 
lives and genius of the authors." Like our own roman- 
ticist poet Longfellow, who rediscovered Europe for 
America, Leigh Hunt was a sympathetic and interpreta- 
tive rather than a creative genius; and like Longfellow, 
an admirable translator. Among his collected poems are 
a number of elegant and spirited versions from various 
mediasval literatures. " The Gentle Armour " is a play- 



no iA History of English l^manticism. 

ful adaptation of a French fabliau " Les Trois Chevaliers 
et la Chemise," which tells of a knight whose hard-hearted 
lady set him the task of fighting his two rivals in the 
lists, armed only in her smock; and, in contrition for 
this harsh imposure, went to the altar with her faith- 
ful champion, wearing only the same bloody sark as her 
bridal garment. At least this is the pretty turn which 
Hunt gave to the story. In the original it had a coarser 
ending. There are also, among these translations from 
mediaeval sources, the Latin drinking song attributed to 
Walter Map — 

Mz'/iz est propositum in taberna mori — 

and Andrea de Basso's terrible " Ode to a Dead Body," 
in fifteenth-century Italian; which utters, with extraor- 
dinary power, the ascetic thought of the Middle Age, 
dwelling with a kind of gloomy exultation on the foulness 
of the human frame in decay. 

In the preface to his " Italian Poets," Hunt speaks of 
" how widely Dante has re-attracted of late the attention 
of the world." He pronounces him " the greatest poet for 
intensity that ever lived," and complains that his metri- 
cal translators have failed to render his "passionate, 
practical, and creative style — a style which may be said 
to write things instead of words." Hunt's introduction 
is a fine piece of critical work. His alert, sparkling, and 
nimble intellect — somewhat lacking in concentration and 
seriousness — but sensitive above all things to the pic- 
turesque, was keenly awake to Dante's poetic greatness. 
On the other hand, his cheerful philosophy and tolerant, 
not to say easy-going moral nature, was shocked by the 
Florentine's bitter pride, and by what he conceives to be 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the "Dante T^vival. m 

his fanaticism, bigotry, superstition, and personal vindic- 
tiveness, when 

" Hell he peoples with his foes, 
Dark scourge of many a guilty line." 

Hunt was a Universalist, and Dante was a Catholic 
Calvinist, There was a determined optimism about 
Hunt, and a buoyancy as of a cork or other light body, 
sometimes a little exasperating to men of less sanguine 
temperament.* He ends by protesting that Dante is a 
semi-barbarian and his "Divine Comedy" too often an 
infernal tragedy. " Such a vision as that of his poem 
(in a theological point of view) seems no better than the 
dream of an hypochondriacal savage." It was some 
years before this, in his lecture on " The Hero as Poet," 
delivered in 1840, that a friend of Leigh Hunt, of a tem- 
perament quite the opposite of his, had spoken a very 
different word touching this cruel scorn — this sceva iiidig- 
Jiatio of Dante's. Carlyle, like Hunt, discovered intejisity 
to be the prevailing character of Dante's genius, em- 
blemed by the pinnacle of the city of Dis; that "red-hot 
cone of iron glowing through the dim immensity of 
gloom." Hunt, the Universalist, said of Dante, "when 
he is sweet-natured once he is bitter a hundred times." 
"Infinite pity," says Carlyle, the Calvinist, "yet also in- 
finite rigour of law; it is so nature is made; it is so 
Dante discerned that she was made. What a paltry no- 
tion is that of his ' Divine Comedy's ' being a poor sple- 
netic, impotent terrestrial libel; putting those into hell 
whom he could not be avenged upon on earth ! I suppose 

* See Dickens' caricature of him as Harold Skimpole in 
^ Bleak House." 



112 <^ History of English Romanticism. 

if ever pity tender as a mother's was in the heart of any 
man, it was in Dante's. But a man who does not know 
rigour cannot pity either. His very pity will be cowardly, 
egoistic — sentimentality, or little better. . , . Morally 
great above all we must call him; it is the beginning of 
all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love; 
as, indeed, what are they but the inverse or converse of 
his love? " 

It is interesting to note that, antipathetic as Hunt's 
nature was, in many ways, not only to the individual 
Dante but to the theological thought of which he was the 
spokesman, in his view of 'the sacred art of the Italian 
Middle Age he anticipated the Pre-Raphaelites and the 
modern interpreters of Dante. Here is a part of what 
he says of the paintings in the Campo Santo at Pisa: 
"The best idea, perhaps, which I can give an English- 
man of the general character of the painting is by refer- 
ring him to the engravings of Albert Durer and the seri- 
ous parts of Chaucer. There is the same want of proper 
costume — the same intense feeling of the human being, 
both in body and soul — the same bookish, romantic, and 
retired character — the same evidences, in short, of antiq- 
uity and commencement, weak (where it is weak) for 
want of a settled art and language, but strong for that 
very reason in first impulses, and in putting down all 
that is felt. . . . The manner in which some of the hoary 
saints in these pictures pore over their books and carry 
their decrepit old age, full of a bent and absorbed feeble- 
ness — the set limbs of the warriors on horseback — the 
sidelong unequivocal looks of some of the ladies playing 
on harps and conscious of their ornaments — the people 
of fashion seated in rows, with Time coming up unawares 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the 'Dante l^evival. 113 

to destroy them — the other rows of elders and doctors of 
the Church, forming part of the array of heaven — the 
uplifted hand of Christ denouncing the wicked at the 
day of judgment — the daring satires occasionally intro- 
duced against monks and nuns — the profusion of atti- 
tudes, expressions, incidents, broad draperies, ornaments 
of all sorts, visions, mountains, ghastly looking cities, 
fiends, angels, sibylline old women, dancers, virgin brides, 
mothers and children, princes, patriarchs, dying saints; 
it would be simply blind injustice to the superabundance 
and truth of conception in all this multitude of imagery 
not to recognize the real inspirers as well as harbingers 
of Raphael and Michael Angelo, instead of confining the 
honour to the Masaccios and Peruginos, [who] . . , are 
no more to be compared with them than the sonneteers 
of Henry VIII. 's time are to be compared with Chaucer. 
Even in the very rudest of the pictures, where the souls 
of the dying are going out of their mouths, in the shape 
of little children, there are passages not unworthy of 
Dante and Michael Angelo. . . . Giotto, be thou one to 
me hereafter, of a kindred brevity, solidity, and stateli- 
ness with that of thy friend, Dante! " * 

Amiong^_all_the._ writers of his generation, Keats was 
most purely the poet, the artist of the beautiful. His 

* " When I was last at Haydon' s, " wrote Keats to his brother 
George in 1818-19, "I looked over a book of prints taken from 
the fresco of the church at Milan, the name of which I forget. 
In it were comprised specimens of the first and second age 
of art in Italy. I do not think I ever had a greater treat out 
of Shakespeare ; full of romance and the most tender feeling ; 
magnificence of drapery beyond everything I ever saw, not 
excepting Raphael's — but grotesque to a curious pitch — yet 
still making up a fine whole, even finer to me than more ac- 
complished works, as there was left so much room for imagi- 
nation." 



114 c^ History of English l^manticism. 

sensitive imagination thrilled to every touch of beauty 
from whatever quarter. That his work is mainly retro- 
spective and eclectic in subject is because a young poet's 
mind responds more readily to books than to life, and 
this young poet did not outlive his youth. In t he Greek 
mythology he found a world of lovely images ready to 
his hand ; in the poetry of Spenser, Chaucer, and Ariosto 
he found another such world. Arcadia and Faeryland — 
"the realms of gold" — he rediscovered them both for 
himself, and he struck into the paths that wound through 
their enchanted thickets with the ardour of an explorer. 
This was the very mood of the Renaissance — this_g£rual 
heat which fuses together the pagan and the Christian 
systems — this indifference of the creative imagination to 
the mere sources and materials of its creations. Indeed, 
there is in Keats' style a " natural magic " which forces 
us back to Shakspere for comparison ; a noticeable like- 
ness to the diction of the Elizabethans, when the classics 
were still a living spring of inspiration, and not a set of 
copies held in terrorem over the head of every new poet. 
-—Keats' break with the classical tradition was early and 
decisive. In his first volume (1S17) there is a piece en- 
titled "Sleep and Poetry," composed after a night passed 
at Leigh Hunt's cottage near Hampstead, which contains 
his literary declaration of faith. After speaking of the 
beauty that fills the universe, and of the office of Imag- 
ination to be the minister and interpreter of this beauty, 
as in the old days when " here her altar shone, even in 
this isle," and "the muses were nigh cloyed with 
honours," he asks: 

"Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism 
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the IDante l^vival. 115 

Made great Apollo blush for this, his land. 

Men were thought wise who could not understand 

His glories: with a puling infant's force, 

They swayed about upon a rocking horse 

And thought it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-souled ! 

The winds of heaven blew, the ocean rolled 

Its gathering waves — ye felt it not. The blue 

Bowed its eternal bosom, and the dew 

Of summer night collected still, to make 

The morning precious. Beautj' was awake ! 

Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead 

To things ye knew not of — were closely wed 

To musty laws, lined out with wretched rule 

And compass vile : so that ye taught a school 

Of dolts to smooth, inlay and clip and fit ; 

Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit. 

Their verses tallied. Easy was the task : 

A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask 

Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race ! 

That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face, 

And did not know it, — no, thej' went about, 

Holding a poor decrepit standard out. 

Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and, in large, 

The name of one Boileau ! " 

This complaint, so far as it relates to the sfy/e of the 
rule-ridden eighteenth-century poetry, had been made 
before : by Cowper, by Wordsworth, by Coleridge. But 
Keats, with his instinct for beauty, pierces to the core of 
the matter. It was because of Pope's defective sense of 
the beautiful that the doubt arose whether he was a poet 
at all. It was because of its 

"... forgetting the great end 
Of Poetry, that it should be a friend 
To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man," 

that the poetry of the classical school was so unsatisfying. 
This is one of the very few passages of Keats that are at 
all doctrinal* or polemic; and as such it has been re- 

*Against the hundreds of maxims from Pope, Keats fur- 
nishes a single motto — the first line of "Endymion " — 
"A thing of beauty is a joy forever." 



ii6 <iA History of English T^omantict'sm. 

peatedly cited by biographers and essayists and literary 
historians. Lowell quotes it, in his essay on Dryden, 
and adds : " Keats was the first resolute and wilful heretic, 
the true founder of the modern school, which admits no 
cis-Elizabethan authority save Milton." Mr. Gosse 
quotes it and says, *' in these lines he has admirably 
summed up the conceptions of the first half of the present 
century with regard to classical poetry." * The passage 
was still fresh when Byron, in the letter to Disraeli al- 
ready quoted f (March 15th, 1820), held it up to scorn as 
the opinion of " a young person learning to write poetry 
and beginning by teaching the art. . . . The writer of 
this is a tadpole of the Lakes, a young disciple of the 
six or seven new schools, in which he has learned to 
write such lines and such sentiments as the above. He 
says ' easy were the task ' of imitating Pope, or it may be 
of equalling him, I presume. I recommend him to try 
before he is so positive on the subject, and then compare 
what he will have //len written, and what he has now 
written, with the humblest and earliest compositions of 
Pope, produced in years still more youthful than those 
of Mr. Keats when he invented his new ' Essay on Criti- 
cism,' entitled ' Sleep and Poetry ' (an ominous title) from 
whence the above canons are taken." 

In a manuscript note on this passage made after Keats' 
death, Byron wrote: "My indignation at Mr, Keats' de- 
preciation of Pope has hardly permitted me to do justice 
to his own genius. . . . He is a loss to our literature; 
and the more so, as he himself, before his death, is said 

*"From Shakespeare to Pope." See also Sidney Colvin's 
"Keats," New York, 1887, pp. 61-64. 
f Vide supra, p. 70. 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the HDante l^evtval. 117 

to have been persuaded that he had not taken the right 
line, and was reforming his style upon the more classical 
models of the language." Keats made a study of Dry- 
den's versification before writing " Lamia " ; but had he 
lived to the age of Methusaleh, he would not have 
"reformed his style" upon any such classical models 
as Lord Byron had in mind. Classical he might 
have become, in the sense in which " Hyperion " is 
classical; but in the sense in which Pope was class- 
ical — never. Pope's Homer he deliberately set aside 
for Chapman's — 

"Yet did I never breathe its pure serene 
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold." * 

Keats had read Virgil, but seemingly not much Latin 
poetry besides, and he had no knowledge of Greek. He 
made acquaintance with the Hellenic world through 
classical dictionaries and a study of the casts in the 
British Museum. But his intuitive grasp of the antique 
ideal of beauty stood him in as good stead as Landor's 
scholarship. In such work as " Hyperion " and the " Ode 
on a Grecian Urn " he mediates between the ancient and 
the modern spirit, from which Landor's clear-cut mar- 
bles stand aloof in chill remoteness. As concerns his 
equipment, Keats stands related to Scott in romance 
learning much as he does to Landor in classical scholar- 
ship. He was no antiquary, and naturally made mistakes 
of detail. In his sonnet '* On First Looking into Chap- 
man's Homer," he makes Cortez, and not Balboa, the 

* That he knew Pope's version is evident from a letter to 
Haydon of May, 1817, given in Lord Houghton's "Life." 



ii8 <iA History of English %omanticism. 

discoverer of the Pacific. A propos oi a line in "The 
Eve of St. Agnes " — 

"And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor " — 

Leigh Hunt called attention to the fact that rushes and 
not carpets covered the floors in the Middle Ages. In 
the same poem, Porphyro sings to his lute an ancient 
ditty, 

"In Provence called 'La Belle Dame sans Merci.' " 

The ditty was by Alain Chartier, who was not a trouba- 
dour, but a Norman by birth and a French court poet of 
the fifteenth century. The title, which Keats found in a 
note in an edition of Chaucer, pleased his fancy and sug- 
gested his ballad,* of the same name, which has nothing 
in common with Chartier's poem. The latter is a con- 
ventional love estrif in the artificial taste of the time. 
But errors of this sort, which any encyclopaedia can cor- 
rect, are perfectly unimportant. 

Byron's sneer at Keats, as " a tadpole of the Lakes," 
was ridiculously wide of the mark. He was nearly of 
the second generation of romantics; he was only three 
years old when "The Ancient Mariner" was published; 
" Christabel " and Scott's metrical romances had all been 
issued before he put forth his first volume. But though 

* He could have known extremely little of mediaeval litera- 
ture ; yet there is nothing anywhere, even in the far more in- 
structed Pre-Raphaelite school which catches up the whole 
of the true mediaeval romantic spirit — the spirit which ani- 
mates the best parts of the Arthurian legend, and of the wild 
stories which float through mediaeval tale-telling, and make 
no small figure in mediaeval theology — as does the short piece 
of 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'" (Saintsbury : "A Short 
History of English Literature," p. 673). 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the T>ante l^vival. 119 

he owes much to Coleridge * and more perhaps to Chat- 
terton, he took no imprint from Wordsworth, and cared 
nothing for Scott. Keats, like his friend Hunt, turned \ 
instinctively away from northern to southern Gothic; j 
from rough border minstrelsy to the mythology and ro- 
mance of the races that dwelt about the midland sea. 
Keats' sensuous nature longed for " a beaker full of the 
warm South." *' I have tropical blood in my veins," 
wrote Hunt, deprecating " the criticism of a Northern 
climate " as applied to his " Story of Rimini," Keats' 
death may be said to have come to him from Scotland, 
not only by reason of the brutal attacks in Blackwood's 
— to which there is some reason for believing that Scott 
was privy — but because the hardships and exposure of 
his Scotch tour laid the foundation of his fatal malady. 
He brought back no literary spoils of consequence from 
the North, and the description of the journey in his letters 
makes it evident that his genius could not find itself there. 
This uncomfortable feeling of alienation is expressed in 
his " Sonnet on Visiting the Tomb of Burns." The 
Scotch landscape seems " cold — strange." • 

"The short-lived paly Summer is but won 
From Winter's ague." 

And in the letter from Dumfries, enclosing the sonnet 
he writes : " I know not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the 
houses, all seem anti-Grecian and anti-Charlemagnish." 
Charlemagnish is Keats' word for the true mediaeval- 
romantic. It is noteworthy that Keats avoided Scott's 
favourite verse forms. " La Belle Dame sans Merci " 
is not in the minstrel ballad measure; and when Keats 

* Vide supra, p. 85. And for Keats' interest in Chatter- 
ton see vol. i., pp. 370-72. 



I20 c/f History of English 'T^pmanticism. 

uses the eight-syllabled couplet, he uses it very differently 
from Scott, without the alternate riming which prevails in 
" The Lay of the Last Minstrel " and all the rest of the 
series. 

A spark from Spenser kindled the flame of poetry in 
Keats. His friend, Cowden Clarke, read him the " Epi- 
thalamium " one day in 1812 in an arbour in the old 
school garden at Enfield, and lent him a copy of "The 
Faery Queene " to take home with him. " He romped 
through the scenes of the romance," reports Mr. Clarke, 
" like a young horse turned into a spring meadow." 
There is something almost uncanny — like the visits of a 
spirit — about these recurrent appearances of Spenser in 
English literary history. It must be confessed that now- 
adays we do not greatly romp through "The Faery 
Queene." There even runs a story that a certain pro- 
fessor of literature in an American college, being con- 
sulted about Spenser by one of his scholars, exclaimed 
impatiently, " Oh, damn Spenser! " But it is worth while 
to have him in the literature, if only as a starter for 
young poets. Keats' earliest known verses are an " Imi- 
tation of Spenser " in four stanzas. His allusions to him 
are frequent, and his fugitive poems include a " Sonnet 
to Spenser" and a number of "Spenserian Stanzas." 
But his only really important experiment in the measure 
of " The Faery Queene " was " The Eve of St. Agnes." 
It was with fine propriety that Shelley chose that meas- 
ure for his elegy on Keats in " Adonais." Keats made a 
careful study of Spenser's verse, the 

"Spenserian vowels that elope with ease " — 
and all the rest of it. His own work in this kind is 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the 'Dante l^vival. 121 

thought to resemble most closely the " Psyche " of the 
Irish poetess, Mary Tighe, published in 1805 * on the 
well-known fable of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius. It 
is inferred that Keats knew the poem from a mention of 
the author in one of his pieces. He also wrote an "Ode 
to Psyche," which seems, however, to have been inspired 
by an engraving in Spenser's "Polymetis." .Mrs. Tighe 
was one of the latest and best of the professed imitators 
of Spenser. There is beauty of a kind in her languidly 
melodious verse and over-profuse imagery, but it is not 
the passionate and quintessential beauty of Keats. She 
is quite incapable of such choice and pregnant word 
effects as abound in every stanza of " St. Agnes " : 

" Unclasps her warmed jewels, one by one " : 

" Buttressed from moonlight " : 
"The raVi?,\c, yearni7ig like a God in pain " : 
"The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion." 

Keats' intimate association with Leigh Hunt, whose 
acquaintance he made in i8i6,was not without influence 
on his literary development. He admired the " Story of 
Rimini," f and he adopted in his early verse epistles and 
in "Endymion" (1818), that free ante-Popean treatment 
of the couplet with eiijambement, or overflow, double 
rimes, etc., which Hunt had practised in the poem itself 
and advocated in the preface. Many passages in " Ri- 
mini " and in Keats' couplet poems anticipate, in their 
easy flow, the relaxed versification of " The Earthly Para- 
dise." This was the Elizabethan type of heroic couplet, 

*The Diet. Nat. Biog. mentions doubtfully an earlier edi- 
tion in 1795. 

|: See "Sonnet on Leigh Hunt's Poem 'The Story of Ri- 
mini.'" Forman's ed., vol. ii., p. 229. 



12 2 <v'^ History of English 'Romanticism. 

and its extreme instance is seen in William Chamber- 
layne's "Pharonnida" (1659). There is no proof of 
Keats' alleged indebtedness to Chamberlayne, though 
he is known to have been familiar with another specimen 
of the type, William Browne's " Britannia's Pastorals." 
Hunt also confirmed Keats in the love of Spenser, 
and introduced him to Ariosto whom he learned to 
read in the Italian, five or six stanzas at a time. Dante 
he read in Gary's translation, a copy of which was the 
only book that he took with him on his Scotch trip. 
"The fifth canto of Dante," he wrote (March, 18 19), 
"pleases me more and more; it is that one in which he 
meets with Paulo and Francesca." He afterwards 
dreamed of the story and wrote a sonnet upon his dream, 
which Rossetti thought " by far the finest of Keats' son- 
nets " next to that on Chapman's " Homer." * Mr. J. M. 
Robertson thinks that the influence of Gary's "Dante" is 
visible in " Hyperion," especially in the recast version 
"Hyperion: A Vision." f And Leigh Hunt suggests 
that in the lines in " The Eve of St. Agnes "— 

"The sculptured dead on each side seem to freeze, 
Emprisoned in black, purgatorial rails : 
Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries. 
He passeth by ; and his weak spirit fails ^^ 

To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails — 

the germ of the thought is in Dante.t Keats wished 

*See Forman's ed., vol. ii., p. 334- , ^„ . , „, 

t "New Essays toward a Critical Method, London, 1897, 

p. 256. 

1 " Come, per sostentar solaio o tetto. 
Per mensola talvolta una figura 
Si vede giunger le ginocchia al petto. 
La qual fa del non ver vera rancura 
Nascere in chi la vede." 

— " Puigatorio, " Canto x., 130-34- 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the T)ante %evival. 123 

that Italian might take the place of French in English 
schools. To Hunt's example was also due, in part, that 
fondness for neologisms for which the latter apologises 
in the preface to "Rimini," and with which Keats was 
wont to enrich his diction, as well as with Chattertonian 
archaisms, Chapmanese compounds, " taffeta phrases, 
silken terms precise" from Elizabethan English, and 
coinages VHviO. poesied, Jollying, eye-earnestly — licenses and 
affectations which gave dire offence to Gifford and the 
classicals generally. 

In the 1820 volume, which includes Keats' maturest 
work, there was a story from the "Decameron," "Isa- 
bella, or the Pot of Basil," which tells how a lady ex- 
humes the body of her murdered lover, cuts off the head 
and buries it in a pot of sweet basil, which she keeps 
in her chamber and waters with her tears. It was per- 
haps symptomatic of a certain morbid sensibility in 
Keats to select this subject from so cheerful a writer 
as Boccaccio. This intensity of love surviving in face 
of leprosy, torment, decay, and material horrors of all 
kinds; this passionate clinging of spirit to body, is a 
mediaeval note, and is repeated in the neo-romantic 
school which derives from Keats; in Rossetti, Swin- 
burne, Morris, O'Shaughnessy, Marzials, and Paine. 
Think of the unshrinking gaze which Dante fixes upon 
the tortures of the souls in pain; of the wasted body 
of Christ upon the cross; of the fasts, flagellations, 
mortifications of penitents; the unwashed friars; the 
sufferings of martyrs. Keats apologises for his en- 
deavour "to make old prose in modern rime more 
sweet," and for his departure from the even, unexcited 
narrative of his original : 



124 c^ History of English l^pmanticism. 

" O eloquent and famed Boccaccio, 
Of thee we now should ask forgiving boon. . . . 
For venturing syllables that ill beseem 
The quiet glooms of such a piteous theme. . . . 

Ah ! wherefore all this wormy circumstance? 
Why linger at the yawning tomb so long? 
O for the gentleness of old Romance, 
The simple plaining of the minstrel's song." 

But it is just this wormy circumstance that rivets the 
poet's attention ; his imagination lingers over Isabella 
kissing the dead face, pointing each eyelash, and wash- 
ing away the loam that disfigures it with her tears; over 
the basil tufts growing rankly from the mouldering head. 

"The thing was vile with green and livid spot," 

but Keats' tenderness pierces the grave. 

It is instructive to compare " Isabella " with Dryden's 
" Sigismonda and Guiscardo," also from the " Decameron" 
and surcharged with the physically horrible. In this tale 
Tancred sends his daughter her lover's heart in a golden 
goblet. She kisses the heart, fills the cup with poison, 
drinks, and dies. The two poems are typical examples 
of romantic and classical handling, though neither is 
quite a masterpiece in its kind. The treatment in Dry- 
den is cool, unimpassioned, objective — like Boccaccio's, 
in fact. The story is firmly told, with a masculine energy 
of verse and language. Sigismonda and Tancred are 
characters, confronted wills, as in drama, and their 
speeches are like tirades from a tragedy of Racine. But 
here Dryden's rhetorical habit and his fondness for rea- 
soning in rime run away with him, and make his art 
inferior to Boccaccio's. Sigismonda argues her case like 
counsel for the defendant. She even enjoys her own 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the T)ante Revival. 125 

argument and carries it out with a gusto into abstrac- 
tions. 

" But leaving that : search we the secret springs, 
And backward trace the principles of things ; 
There shall we find, that when the world began 
One common mass composed the mould of man," etc. 

Dryden's grossness of taste mars his narrative at sev- 
eral points. The satirist in him will not let him miss 
the chance for a sneer at priests and another at William 
III.'s standing army. -^He makes his heroine's love igno- 
bly sensual. She is a widow, who having "tasted mar- 
riage joys," is unwilling to live single. Dryden's dour- 
geois manner is capable even of ludicrous descents. 

"The sudden bound awaked the sleeping sire. 
And showed a sight no parent can desire." 

In Keats' poem there are no characters dramatically 
opposed. Lorenzo and Isabella have no individuality 
apart from their love; passion has absorbed character. 
The tale is not evolved firmly and continuously, but with 
lyrical outbursts, a poignancy of sympathy at the points 
of highest tragic tensity and a swooning sensibility all 
through, that sometimes breaks into weakness. There 
can be no question, however, which poem is the moxt/elt; 
no question, either, as to which method is superior — at 
least as between these two artists, and as applied to sub- 
jects of this particular kind. 

"Isabella" is \x\ ottava rima, "The Eve of St. Agnes" 
in the Spenserian stanza. This exquisite creation has 
all the insignia of romantic art and has them in a dan- 
gerous degree. It is brilliant with colour, richly ornate, 
tremulous with emotion. Only the fine instinct of the 



126 <-A History of English l^omanticism. 

artist saved it from the overladen decoration and cloying 
sweetness of " Endymion," and kept it chaste in its 
warmth. As it is, the story is almost too slight for its 
descriptive mantle "rough with gems and gold." Such 
as it is, it is of Keats' invention and of the " Romeo and 
Juliet" variety of plot. A lover who is at feud with his 
mistress' clan ventures into his foemen's castle while a 
revel is going on, penetrates by the aid of her nurse to 
his lady's bower, and carries her off while all the house- 
hold are sunk in drunken sleep. All this in a night of 
wild weather and on St. Agnes' Eve, when, according to 
popular belief, maidens might see their future husbands 
in their dreams, on the performance of certain conditions. 
The resemblance of this poem to " Christabel " at several 
points, has already been mentioned,* and especially in 
the description of the heroine's chamber. But the differ- 
ences are even more apparent. Coleridge's art is tem- 
perate and suggestive; spiritual, too, with an unequalled 
power of haunting the mind with a sense of ghostly pres- 
ences. In his scene the touches are light and few; all 
is hurried, mysterious, shadowy. But Keats was a word 
painter, his treatment more sensuous than Coleridge's, 
and fuller of imagery. He lingers over the figure of the 
maiden disrobing, and over the furnishings of her room. 
The Catholic elegancies of his poem, as Hunt called 
them, and the architectural details are there for their own 
sake — as pictures; the sculptured dead in the chapel, the 
foot-worn stones, the cobwebbed arches, broad hall pillar, 
and dusky galleries; the "little moonlight room, pale, 
latticed^ chill"; the chain-drooped lamp: 

"The carven angels ever eager-eyed " 
* Vide stipra, p. S5. 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the T>ante "T^evwal. 127 

that 

"Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests, 
With hair blown back and wings put crosswise on their 
breasts." 

Possibly " La Belle Dame sans Merci " borrows a hint 
from the love-crazed knight in Coleridge's "' Love," who 
is haunted by a fiend in the likeness of an angel ; but 
here the comparison is to Keats' advantage. Not even 
Coleridge sang more wildly well than the singer of this 
weird ballad strain, which has seemed to many critics * 
the masterpiece of this poet, wherein his " natural 
magic" reaches its most fascinating subtlety and purity 
of expression. 

The famous picture of the painted " casement, high and 
triple-arched " in Madeline's chamber, " a burst of rich- 
ness, noiseless, coloured, suddenly enriching the moon- 
light, as if a door of heaven were opened," f should be 
compared with Scott's no less famous description of the 
east oriel of Melrose Abbey by moonlight, and the com- 
parison will illustrate a distinction similar to that already 
noted between the romanticism of Coleridge and Scott. 
The latter is here depicting an actual spot, one of the 
great old border abbeys; national pride and the pathos 
of historic ruins mingle with the description. Made- 
line's castle stood in the country of dream ; and it was 
an "elfin storm from fairyland" that came to aid the 

*Rossetti, Colvin, Gates, Robertson, Forman , and others, 
f Leigh Hunt. It has been objected to this passage that 
moonlight is not strong enough to transmit colored rays, like 
sunshine (see Colvin's "Keats," p. i6o). But the mistake — 
if it is one — is shared by Scott. 

"The moonbeam kissed the holy pane 
And threw on the pavement a blood}' stain." 

— "Lay of the Last Minstrel," Canto ii. , xi. 



128 <iA History of English Romanticism. 

lovers' flight,* and all the creatures of his tale are but 
the 

"Shadows haunting fairily 
The brain new stuffed in youth with triumphs gay 
Of old Romance." 

In Keats is the romantic escape, the longing to 

"leave the world unseen, 
And with thee fade away into the forest dira."f 

Keats cared no more for history than he did for con- 
temporary politics. Courthope % quotes a passage from 
" Endymion " to illustrate his indifference to everything 
but art: 

" Hence, pageant history ! Hence, gilded cheat ! . . . 
Many old rotten-timbered boats there be 
Upon thy vaporous bosom, magnified 
To goodly vessels ; many a sail of pride. 
And golden-keeled, is left unlaunched and dry. 
But wherefore this? What care, though owl did fly 
About the great Athenian admiral's mast? 
What care though striding Alexander past 
The Indus with his Macedonian numbers? 

. . . Juliet leaning 
Amid her window-flowers, — sighing, — weaning 
Tenderly her fancy from its maiden snow. 
Doth more avail than these : the silver flow 
Of Hero's tears, the swoon of Imogen, 
Fair Pastorella in the bandit's den. 
Are things to brood on with more ardency 
Than the death-day of empires." 

* It is interesting to learn that the line 

" For o'er the Southern moors 
I have a home for thee " 

read in the original draught "Over the bleak Dartmoor," etc. 
Dartmoor was in sight of Teignmouth where Keats once 
spent two months ; but he cancelled the local allusion in obe- 
dience to a correct instinct. 

t " Ode to a Nightingale." 

i:"The Liberal Movement in English Literature," Lon- 
don, 1885, p. 181. 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the T)ante 'Revival. 1 29 

This passage should be set beside the complaint in 
"Lamia" of the disenchanting touch of science: 

"There was an awful rainbow once in heaven," etc. 

Keats is the poet of romantic emotion, as Scott of ro- 
mantic action. Professor Gates says that Keats' heroes X 
never do anything.* It puzzles the reader of " The Eve 
of St. Agnes" to know just why Porphyro sets out the 
feast of cates on the little table by Madeline's bedside 
unless it be to give the poet an opportunity for his lus- 
cious description of "the lucent syrups tinct with cinna- 
mon " and other like delicacies. In the early fragment 
"Calidore," the hero — who gets his name from Spenser 
— does nothing in some hundred and fifty lines but assist 
two ladies to dismount from their palfreys. To revert, as 
before, to Ariosto's programme, it was not the arme and 
aiidaci imprese which Keats sang, but the domie, the 
amon\ and the cortesie. Feudal war array was no con- 
cern of his, but the " argent revelry " of masque and 
dance, and the " sil_ver-snarling trumpets " in the musi- 
cians' gallery. He was the poet of the lute and the 
nightingale, rather than of the shock of spear in tourney 
and crusade. His " Specimen of an Induction to a 
Poem " begins 

" Lo ! I must tell a tale of chivalry." 

But he never tells it. The piece evaporates in visions of 
pure loveliness; " large white plumes " ; sweet ladies on 
the worn tops of old battlements; light-footed damsels 
standing in sixes and sevens about the hall in courtly 
talk. Meanwhile the lance is resting against the wall. 

* "Studies and Appreciations." Lewis ^' Gates. New 
York, 1S90, p. 17. V 



130 <t/l History of English l^pmanticism. 

"Ah ! shall I ever tell its cruelty, 
When the fire flashes from a warrior's eye, 
And his tremendous hand is grasping it? " 

" No," answers the reader, " I don't think you ever 
will. Leave that sort of thing to Walter Scott, and go 
on and finish your charming fragment of 'The Eve of St. 
Mark,' which stops provokingly just where Bertha was 
reading the illuminated manuscript, as she sat in her 
room of an April evening, when 

' On the western window panes. 
The chilly sunset faintly told 
Of unmatured green valleys cold. ' " * 

This quaintly attractive fragment of Keats was written 
while he was living in the old cathedral and college city 
of Winchester. " Some time since," he writes to his 
brother George, September, 18 19, " I began a poem called 
' The Eve of St. Mark, ' quite in the spirit of town quietude, 
I think it will give you the sensation of walking about an 
old country town in a coolish evening." The letter de- 
scribes the maiden-lady-like air of the side streets, with 
doorsteps fresh from the flannel, the doors themselves 
black, with small brass handles and lion's head or ram's 
head knockers, seldom disturbed. He speaks of his 
walks through the cathedral yard and two college-like 
squares, grassy and shady, dwelling-places of deans and 
prebendaries, out to St. Cross Meadows with their Gothic 
tower and Alms Square. Mr. Colvin thinks that Keats 
" in this piece anticipates in a remarkable degree the 
feeling and method of the modern pre-Raphaelite 
schools " ; and that it is " perfectly in the spirit of Ros- 

* See vol. i., p. 371, and for Cumberland's poem, on the 
same superstition, ibid., 177. 



Keats, Leigh Hunt, and theT>ante l^evival. 131 

setti (whom we know that the fragment deeply impressed 
and interested)." Mr. Forman, indeed, quotes Rossetti's 
own dictum (works of John Keats, vol. ii., p. 320) that 
the poem "shows astonishingly real mediaevalism for one 
not bred as an artist," 

It is in the PtecRaghaelites that Keats' influence on 
our later poetry is seen in its most concentrated shape. 
But it is traceable in Tennyson, in Hood, in the Brown- 
ings, and in many others, where his name is by no means 
written in water. "Wordsworth," says Lowell, "has in- 
fluenced most the ideas of succeeding poets; Keats their 
forms." 



CHAPTER IV. 

^be TRomantic Scbool in ©erman^.* 

Cross-fertilization, at least in these modern eras, is 
as necessary in the life of a literature as in that of an 
animal or a plant. English romanticism, though it 
started independently, did not remain an isolated phe- 

* Besides the authorities quoted or referred to in the text, 
the materials used in this chapter are drawn mainly from the 
standard histories of German literature ; especially from 
Georg Brandes' " Hauptstromungen in der Litteratur des 
Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts " (1872-76); Julian Schmidt's 
" Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur " (Berlin, 1890); H.J. 
T. Hettner's " Litteraturgeschichte" (Braunschweig, 1872); 
Wilhelm Scherer's "History of German Literature" (Cony- 
beare's translation. New York, 1886) ; Karl Hillebrand's 
"German Thought" (trans.. New York, 1880); Vogt und 
Koch's "Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur" (Leipzig and 
Wien, 1897). My own reading in the German romantics 
is by no means extensive. I have read, however, a number 
of Tieck's "Marchen" and of Fouque's romances; Novalis' 
"Hymns to the Night" and "Heinrich von Ofterdiugen" ; A. 
W. Schlegel's "Lectures on Dramatic Literature" and F. 
Schlegel's "Lucinde " ; all of Uhland's ballads and most of 
Heine's writings in verse and prose; a large part of "Des 
Knaben Wunderhorn," and the selections from Achim von 
Arnini, Clemens Brentano, and Joseph Gorres contained in 
Koch's "Deutsche National Litteratur," 146 Band (Stuttgart, 
1891). These last include Brentano's "Die Erfindung des 
Rosenkranzes. " " Kasperl und Annerl," " Gockel und Hinkerl, " 
etc., and Arnim's " Kronenwachter, " a scene from "Die Pap- 
stin Johanna," etc. I have, of course, read Madame de 
Stael's "L'AUemagne " ; all of Carlyle' s papers on German 
literature, with his translations ; the Grimm fairy tales and 
the like. 

132 



The 'Romantic School in Germany. 133 

nomenon; it was related to the general literary move- 
ment in Europe. Even Italy had its romantic movement; 
Manzoni began, like Walter Scott, by translating Biirger's 
" Lenore " and " Wild Huntsman " ; and afterwards, like 
Schlegel in Germany and Hugo in France, attacked the 
classical entrenchments in his " Discourse of the Three 
Unities." It is no part of our undertaking to write the 
history of the romantic schools in Germany and France. 
But in each of those countries the movement had points 
of likeness and unlikeness which shed light upon our 
own ; and an outline sketch of the German and French 
schools will help the reader better to understand both 
what English romanticism was, and what it was not. 

In Germany, as in England, during the eighteenth cen- 
tury, the history of romanticism is a history of arrested 
development. Romanticism existed in solution, but was 
not precipitated and crystallised until the closing years 
of the period. The current set flowing by Biirger's bal- 
lads and Goethe's "Gotz," was met and checked by a 
counter-current, the new enthusiasm for the antique pro- 
moted by Winckelmann's * works on classic art, by the 
neo-paganism of Goethe's later writings, and by the in- 
fluence of Lessing's f clear, rationalising, and thoroughly 
Protestant spirit.| 

We may note, at the outset, the main features in which 
the German romanticism differed from the English. 
First, then, it was more definitely a movemefit. It was 
organised, self-conscious, and critical. Indeed, it was 

*" Gedanken iiber die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke 
in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst," 1755. " Geschichte der 
Kunst des Alterthums, " 1764. 

f "Laocoon," 1766. 

X See vol. i., chap. xi. ; and particularly pp. 3S3-87. 



134 <^ History of English l^manticism. 

' in criticism and not in creative literature that its highest 
(•successes were won. Coleridge, Scott, and Keats, like 

I their English forerunners in the eighteenth century,* 
worked independently of one another. They did not 
tconspire to a common end; had little personal contact — ■ 
Iwere hardly acquaintances, and in no sense a "school." 
iButthe German romanticists constituted a compact group 
;with coherent aims. They were intimate friends and as- 
fsociates; travelled, lived, and worked together; edited 
•'each other's books and married each other's sisters.f 
They had a theory of art, a programme, and a propa- 
ganda; were aggressive and polemical, attacking their 
adversaries in reviews, and in satirical tales, J poems, 
and plays. Their headquarters were at Jena, " the cen- 
tral point," says Heine, "from which the new aesthetic 
dogma radiated. I advisedly say dogma, for this school 
began with a criticism of the art productions of the past, 
and with recipes for the art works of the future." Their 
organ was the Athenceum, established by Friedrich Schle- 
gel at Berlin in 1798, the date of Wordsworth's and Cole- 
ridge's " Lyrical Ballads," and the climacteric year of 
English and German romanticism. 

The first number of the AthencBum contained the mani- 
festo of the new school, written by Friedrich Schlegel, 
the seminal mind of the coterie. The terms of this pro- 
nunciamento are somewhat rapt and transcendental ; but 
through its mist of verbiage, one discerns that the ideal 

* See vol. i., pp. 422-23. 

f Novalis' and Wackenroder's remains were edited by Tieck 
and F. Schlegel. Arnim married Brentano's sister Bettina — 
Goethe's Bettina. 

X E.g., Tieck's "Der Gestiefelte Kater," against Nicolai 
and the Aufkldrimg. 



The Romantic School in Germany. 135 

of romantic art is announced to be: beauty for beauty's 
sake, the union of poetry and life, and the absolute free- 
dom of the artist to express himself. " Romantic poetry," 
says Schlegel — "and, in a certain sense, all poetry ought 
to be romantic — should, in representing outward objects, 
also represent itself." There is nothing here to indicate 
the precise line which German romantic poetry was to 
take; but there is the same rejection of authority, the 
same assertion of the right of original genius to break a 
path for itself, which was made, in their various ways, by 
Wordsworth and Coleridge in the " Lyrical Ballads," by 
Keats in *' Sleep and Poetry," and by Victor Hugo in 
the preface to " Cromwell." 

A second respect in which German romanticism differed 
from English was in its thoroughgoing character. It is 
the disposition of the German mind to synthesise thought 
and life, to carry out theory into practice. Each of those 
imposing systems of philosophy, Kant's, Fichte's, Schel- 
ling's, Hegel's, has its own cesthetik as well as its own 
ethik. It seeks to interpret all human activities from a 
central principle; to apply its highest abstractions to 
literature, government, religion, the fine arts, and society. 
The English mind is practical rather than theoretical. 
It is sensible, cautious, and willing to compromise; dis- 
trusting alike the logical habit of the French to push out 
premises into conclusions at all hazards; and the Ger- 
man habit of system-building. The Englishman has no 
system; he has his whim, and is careless of consistency. 
It is quite possible for him to have an aesthetic liking 
for the Middle Ages, without wishing to restore them as 
an actual state of society. It is hard for an Englishman 
to understand to what degree a literary man, like Schiller, 



136 <^ History of English Romanticism. 

was influenced in his writings by the critical philosophy 
of Kant; or how Schelling's transcendental idealism was 
used to support Catholicism, and Hegel made a prop to 
Protestant orthodoxy and Junkerism. " Tragedies and 
romances," wrote Mme. de Stael, "have more importance 
in Germany than in any other country. They take them 
seriously there; and to read such and such a book, or 
see such and such a play, has an influence on the destiny 
and the life. What they admire as art, they wish to in- 
troduce into real life; and poetry, philosophy, the ideal, 
in short, have often an even greater empire over the Ger- 
mans than nature and the passions." In proof of this, 
she adduces the number of young Germans who com- 
mitted suicide in consequence of reading "Werther"; 
or took to highway robbery in emulation of "Die Rau- 
ber." 

Jin England, accordingly, romanticism was a merely 
literary revolution and kept strictly within the domain of 
* art. Scott's political conservatism was indeed, as we 
have seen, not unrelated to his antiquarianism and his 
fondness for the feudal past; but he remained a Protes- 
tant Tory. And as to his Jacobitism, if a Stuart pre- 
tender had appeared in Scotland in 18 15, we may be 
sure that the canny Scott would not have taken arms in 
his behalf against the Hanoverian king. Coleridge's 
reactionary politics had nothing to do with his roman- 
ticism; though it would perhaps be going too far to deny 
that his reverence for what was old and tested by time 
in the English church and constitution may have had its 
root in the same temper of mind which led him to com- 
pose archaic ballad-romances like " Christabel " and 
" The Dark Ladye." But in Germany " throne and altar " 



7he 'Romantic School in Germany. 137 

became the shibboleth of the school; half of the roman- 
ticists joined the Catholic Church, and the new litera- 
ture rallied to the side of aristocracy and privilege. 

A third respect in which the German movement differed 
from the English is partly implied in what has been said 
above. In Germany the romantic revival was contempo- 
raneous with a great philosophical development which 
influenced profoundly even the lighter literature of the 
time. Hence the mysticism which is found in the work 
of many of the romanticists, and particularly in the writ- 
ings of Novalis. Novalis was a disciple of Schelling, 
and Schelling the continuator of Fichte. Fichte's "Wis- 
senschaftslehre " (1794) is the philosophical corner-stone , 

of the German romantic school. The freedom of the! J'' 

fancy from the thraldom of the actual world; the right of 1 ••^' 
the Ego to assert itself fully; the principle formulated ' 
by Friedrich Schlegel, that " the caprice of the poet knows ] 
no law"; all these literary doctrines were corollaries of 
Fichte's objective idealism.* It is needless to say that, 
while romantic art usually partakes of the mysterious, there 

* As to the much-discussed romantic irony, the theory of 
which played a part in the German movement corresponding 
somewhat to Hugo's doctrine of the grotesque, it seems to 
have made no impression in England. I can discover no 
mention of it in Coleridge. Carlyle, in the first of his two 
essays on Richter (1827) , expressly distinguishes true humour 
from irony, which he describes as a faculty of caricature, 
consisting "chiefly in a certain superficial distortion or I'ever- 
sal of objects " — the method of Swift or Voltaire. That is, 
Carlyle uses irony in the common English sense ; the Socratic 
irony, the irony of the "Modest Proposal." The earliest at- 
tempt that I have encountered to interpret to the English 
public what Tieck and the Schlegels meant by "irony " is an 
article in Blackwood' s for September, 1835, on "The Modern 
German School of Irony " ; but its analysis is not very einge' 
hend. 



138 c/^ History of English 'T{omanticism. 

is nothing of this philosophical or transcendental mys- 
ticism in the English romanticists. If we were to expect 
it anywhere it would be in Coleridge, who became the 
mediator between German and English thought. But 
Coleridge's poetry was mainly written before he visited 
Germany and made acquaintance with the systems of 
Kant and Schelling; and in proportion as his specula- 
tive activity increased, his creative force declined. There 
is enough of the marvellous and the unexplained in 
" Christabel," and "The Ancient Mariner"; but the 
" mystic ruby " and the " blue flower " of the Teutonic 
symbolists are not there. 

The German romantic school, in the limited and pre- 
cise sense of the term, consisted of the brothers August 
Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, Fried- 
rich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Johann Dietrich Gries, 
Tieck's friend Wackenroder, and — at a distance — 
Zacharias Werner, the dramatist; besides a few others, 
their associates or disciples, whose names need not here 
be mentioned. These were, as has been said, personal 
friends; they began to be heard of about 1795 ; and their 
quarters were at Jena and Berlin. A later or younger group 
(^Spdtrotnantiker) gathered in 1808 about the Zcitung Jiir 
Einsiedler, published at Heidelberg. These were Clem- 
ens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, Ludwig Uhland, Joseph 
Gorres, and the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. 
Arnim, Brentano, and Gorres were residing at the time at 
Heidelberg; the others contributed from a distance. 
Arnim edited the Einsiedler ; Gorres was teaching in the 
university. There were, of course, many other adherents 
of the school, working individually at different times and 
places, scattered indeed all over Germany, and of various 



The 'Romantic School in Germany, 139 

degrees of importance or unimportance, of whom I need 
mention only Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, the popular 
novelist and author of " Undine." 

The history of German romanticism has been repeat- 
edly told. There are exhaustive treatments of the sub- 
ject by Julian Schmidt, Koberstein, Hettner (" Die Ro- 
mantische Schule," Braunschweig, 1850); Haym ("Die 
Romantische Schule," Berlin, 1870); by the Danish 
critic, Georg Brandes (" Den Romantiske Skole i Tydsk- 
land "). But the most famous review of this passage of 
literary history is the poet Heine's brilliant little book, 
" Die Romantische Schule," * published at Paris in 1833. 
This was written as a kind of supplement to Mme. de 
Stael's "L'Allemagne" (1813), and was intended to in- 
struct the French public as to some misunderstandings 
in Mme. de Stael's book, and to explain what German 
romanticism really was. Professor Boyesen cautions us 
to be on our guard against the injustice and untrustworth- 
iness of Heine's report. The warning is perhaps not 
needed, for the animus of his book is sufficiently obvious. 
Heine had begun as a romantic poet, but he had parted 
company with the romanticists because of the reactionary 
direction which the movement took. He had felt the 
spell, and he renders it with wonderful vividness in his 
history of the school. But, at the same time, the impa- 
tience of the political radical and the religious sceptic — 
the "valiant soldier in the war for liberty" — and the 
bitterness of the exile for opinion's sake, make them- 



* An English translation was published in this country in 
1882. See also H. H. Boyesen 's "Essays on German Litera- 
ture" (1892) for three papers on the "Romantic School in 
Germany. " 



T40 <-A History of English l^omanticism. 

selves felt. His sparkling and malicious wit turns the 
whole literature of romanticism into sport; and his abuse 
of his former teacher, A. W, Schlegel, is personal and 
coarse beyond description. Twenty years ago, he said, 
when he was a lad, what overflowing enthusiasm he would 
have lavished upon Uhland! Reused to sit on the ruins 
of the old castle at Diisseldorf declaiming Uhland's poem 

"A wandering shepherd young and fair 
Beneath the roj'al castle strayed." 

"But so much has happened since then! What then 
seemed to me so grand; all that chivalry and Catholi- 
cism; those cavaliers that hack and hew at each other in 
knightly tournaments; those gentle squires and virtuous 
dames of high degree; the Norseland heroes and minne- 
singers; the monks and nuns; ancestral tombs thrilling 
with prophetic powers ; colourless passion, dignified by the 
high-sounding title of renunciation, and set to the ac- 
companiment of tolling bells; a ceaseless whining of the 
'Miserere'; how distasteful all that has become tome 
since then ! " And — of Fouque's romances — " But our 
age turns away from all fairy pictures, no matter how 
beautiful. . . . This reactionary tendency, this continual 
praise of the nobility, this incessant glorification of the 
feudal system, this everlasting knight-errantry balderdash 
. . . this everlasting sing-song of armours, battle-steeds, 
high-born virgins, honest guild-masters, dwarfs, squires, 
castles, chapels, minnesingers, faith, and whatever else 
that rubbish of the Middle Ages may be called, wearied 
us." 

It is a part of the irony of things that this satirist of 
romance should have been precisely the one to compose 



The ^{omantic School in Germany. 141 

the most popular of all romantic ballads; and that the 
most current of all his songs should have been the one in 
which he sings of the enchantress of the Rhine, 

"Ich weiss niclit was soil es bedeuten 
Dass Ich so traurig bin." 

The "Loreley" is translated into many tongues, and is 
sung everywhere. In Germany it is a really national 
song. And yet the tale on which it is founded is not 
an ancient folk legend — " ein Mahrchen aus alten Zeiten " 
— but a modern invention of Clemens Brentano, who first 
published it in 1802 in the form of a ballad inserted in 
one of his novels : 

"Zu Bacharach am Rheine 
Wohnt' eine Za^||berin : 
Sie war so schon und feine 
Und riss viel Herzen bin." 

A certain forgotten romanticist, Graf Loeben, made a 
lyrical tale out of it 19 1821, and Heine composed his 
ballad in 1824, afterwards set to the mournful air in 
which it is now universally familiar. 

It has been mentioned that Heine's " Romantische 
Schule " was a sort of continuation and correction of 
Mme. de Stael's "L'AlIemagne." That very celebrated 
book was the result of the distinguished lady's residence 
in Germany, and of her determination to reveal Germany 
to France. It has been compared in its purpose to the 
"Germania" of Tacitus, in which the historian held up 
the primitive virtues of the Teutonic race as a lesson and 
a warning to corrupt Rome. Mme. de Stael had arranged 
to publish her book in 18 10, and the first impression of 
ten thousand copies had already been printed, when the 



142 i/J History of English %omanticism. 

whole edition was seized and destroyed by the police, 
and the author was ordered to quit France within twenty- 
four hours. All this, of course, was at the instance of 
Napoleon, who was by no means above resenting the 
hostility of a lady author. But the Minister of Police, 
General Savary, assumed the responsibility of the affair; 
and to Mme. de Stael's remonstrance he wrote in reply : 
" It appeared to me that the air of this country did not 
agree with you, and we are not yet reduced to seek for 
models amongst the people you admire [the Germans]. 
Your last work is not French." It was not, accordingly, 
until 1813 that Mme. de Stael's suppressed work on Ger- 
many saw the light. 

The only passages in it that need engage our attention 
are those in which the author endeavours to interpret to 
a classical people the literature of a Gothic race. In 
her chapter entitled " Of Classic and Romantic Poetry," 
she says: "The word romantic has been lately introduced 
in Germany to designate that kind of poetry which is de- 
rived from the songs of the troubadours; that which owes 
its birth to the union of chivalry and Christianity." She 
mentions the comparison — evidently derived from Schle- 
gel's lectures which she had attended — of ancient poetry 
to sculpture and modern to painting; explains that the 
French incline towards classic poetry, and the English — 
"the most illustrious of the Germanic nations" — towards 
"that which owes its birth to chivalry and romance." 
"The English poets of our times, without entering into 
concert with the Germans, have adopted the same system. 
Didactic poetry has given place to the fictions of the Mid- 
dle Ages." She observes that simplicity and definite- 
ness, that a certain corporeality and externality — or what 



The Romantic School in Germany. 143 

in modern critical dialect we would call objectivity — are 
notes of antique art; while variety and shading of colour, 
and a habit of self-reflection developed by Christianity 
[subjectivity], are the marks of modern art. "Simplicity 
in the arts would, among the moderns, easily degenerate 
into coldness and abstraction, while that of the ancients 
was full of life and animation. Honour and love, valour 
and pity, were the sentiments which distinguished the 
Christianity of chivalrous ages; and those dispositions of 
the soul could only be displayed by dangers, exploits, 
love, misfortunes — that romantic interest, in short, by 
which pictures are incessantly varied." Mme. de Stael's 
analysis here does not go very deep, and her expression 
is lacking in precision; but her meaning will be obvious 
to those who have well considered the various definitions 
and expositions of these contrasted terms with which we 
set out. Without deciding between the comparative mer- 
its of modern classic and romantic work, Mme. de Stael 
points out that the former must necessarily be imitative. 
"The literature of the ancients is, among the moderns, a 
transplanted literature; that of chivalry and romance is 
indigenous. . . . The literature of romance is alone capa- 
ble of further improvement, because, being rooted in our 
own soil, that alone can continue to grow and acquire 
fresh life; it expresses our religion; it recalls our his- 
tory." Hence she notes the fact that while the Spaniards 
of all classes know by heart the verses of Calderon; 
while Shakspere is a popular and national poet among 
the English ; and the ballads of Goethe and Biirger are 
set to music and sung all over Germany; the French 
classical poets are quite unknown to the common people, 
" because the arts in France are not, as elsewhere, natives 



144 «^ History of English l^omanticism. 

of the very country in which their beauties are displayed." 
In her review of German poetry she gives a brief descrip- 
tion, among other things, of the " Nibelungen Lied," and 
a long analysis of Biirger's "Leonora" and "Wilde 
Jager" She says that there are four English translations 
of "Leonora," of which William Spenser's is the best. 
"The analogy between the English and German allows a 
complete transfusion of the originality of style and versi- 
fication of Biirger. ... It would be difficult to obtain 
the same result in French, where nothing strange or odd 
seems natural." She points out that terror is " an in- 
exhaustible source of poetical effect in Germany. . . . 
Stories of apparitions and sorcerers are equally well re- 
ceived by the populace and by men of more enlightened 
minds." She notes the fondness of the new school for 
Gothic architecture, and describes the principles of 
Schlegelian criticism. She transcribes A. W. Schlegel's 
praises of the ages of faith and the generous brotherhood 
of chivalry, and his lament that "the noble energy of 
ancient times is lost," and that "our times alas! no 
longer know either faith or love." The German critics 
aflfirm that the best traits of the French character were 
effaced during the reign of Louis XIV. ; that " literature, 
in ages which are called classical, loses in originality 
what it gains in correctness " ; that the French tragedies 
are full of pompous affectation ; and that from the middle 
of the seventeenth century, a constrained and affected 
manner had prevailed throughout Europe, symbolised by 
the wig worn by Louis XIV. in pictures and bas-reliefs, 
where he is portrayed sometimes as Jupiter and some- 
times as Hercules clad only in his lion's skin — but al- 
ways with the perruque. Heine complains that Mme. de 



The 'Romantic School in Germany. 145 

Stael fell into the hands of the Schlegels, when in Ger- 
many, and that her account of German literature was col- 
oured by their prejudices; that William Schlegel, in par- 
ticular, became her escort at all the capitals of Europe 
and won great eclat thereby 

Schlegel's elegiac lament over the decay of chivalry 
may remind the English reader of the famous passage in 
Burke * about Marie Antoinette. " Little did I dream 
that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon 
her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of 
honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords 
must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a 
look that threatened her with insult. But the age of 
chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and 
calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is 
extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold 
that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submis- 
sion, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the 
heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit 
of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the 
cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment 
and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibil- 
ity of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain 
like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated 
ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under 
which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its gross- 
ness." t 

But Burke's reaction against the levelling spirit of 

*Gentz, "The German Burke," translated the "Reflections 
on the Revolution in France " into German in 1796. 

f See also in the same tract, Burke's tribute to the value of 
hereditary nobility, and remember that these were the words 
of a Whig statesman. 



146 tt// History of English Romanticism. 

French democracy was by no means so thoroughgoing as 
the romanticist protest in Germany, It was manifestly 
impossible to revive the orders of chivalry, as a practical 
military system; or to recreate the feudal tenures in their 
entirety. Nor did even the most romantic of the German 
romanticists dream of this. They appealed, however, to 
the knightly principles of devotion to church and king, 
of honour, of religious faith, and of personal loyalty to 
the suzerain and the nobility. It was these political 
and theological aspects of the movement that disgusted 
Heine. He says that just as Christianity was a reaction 
against Roman materialism; and the Renaissance a re- 
action against the extravagances of Christian spiritual- 
ism ; and romanticism in turn a reaction against the vapid 
imitations of antique classic art; "so also do we now 
behold a reaction against the re-introduction of that 
Catholic, feudal mode of thought, of that knight-errantry 
and priestdom, which were being inculcated through lit- 
erature and the pictorial arts, . . . For when the artists 
of the Middle Ages were recommended as models , . . 
the only explanation of their superiority that could be 
given was that these men believed in that which they de- 
picted. , . , Hence the artists who were honest in their 
devotion to art, and who sought to imitate the pious dis- 
tortions of those miraculous pictures, the sacred uncouth- 
ness of those marvel-abounding poems, and the inex- 
plicable mysticisms of those olden works , , made a 
pilgrimage to Rome, where the vicegerent of Christ was 
to re-invigorate consumptive German art with asses' 
milk." 

A number of the romanticists were Catholic by birth. 
There was Joseph von Eichendorff, e.g., who had a strong 



The %omantic School in Germany. 147 

admiration for the Middle Ages, wrote sacred poetry, and 
published in 1815 a novel entitled " Ahnung und Gegen- 
wart," the hero of which ends by retiring to a monastery. 
And Joseph Gorres, who published a work on German 
Volksbilcher'^' (1807); a follower of Schelling and editor 
of Der Rheinische Merkur, a violent anti-Gallican jour- 
nal during the war of liberation. Gorres, according to 
Heine, " threw himself into the arms of the Jesuits," and 
became the " chief support of the Catholic propaganda at 
Munich " ; lecturing there on universal history to an audi- 
ence consisting chiefly of pupils from the Romish semi- 
naries. Another Sj>dfromantiker, born Catholic, was 
Clemens Brentano, whom Heine describes in 1833 as 
having lived at Frankfort for the last fifteen years in 
hermit-like seclusion, as a corresponding member of the 
propaganda. For six years (1818-24) Brentano was con- 
stantly at the bedside of the invalid nun, Anna Katharina 
Emmerich, at Diilmen. She was a " stigmatic," afflicted, 
i e., with a mysterious disease which impressed upon her 
body marks thought to be miraculous counterfeits of the 
wounds of Christ. She had trances and visions, and 
uttered revelations which Brentano recorded and after- 
wards published in several volumes, that were translated 
into French and Italian and widely circulated among the 
faithful. 

As adherents of the romantic school who were born and 
bred Protestants, but became converts to the Catholic 
faith, Heine enumerates Friedrich Schlegel, Tieck, No- 
valis, Werner, Schiitz, Carove, Adam Miiller, and Count 

* Dream books, medicine books, riddle books, almanacs, 
craftsmen's proverbs, fabulous travels, prophecies, legends, 
romances and the like, hawked about at fairs. 



148 z/1 History of English 'Romanticism. 

Stolberg, This list, he says, includes only authors; "the 
number of painters who in swarms simultaneously abjured 
Protestantism and reason was much larger." But Tieck 
and Novalis never formally abjured Protestantism. They 
detested the Reformation and loved the mediaeval Church, 
but looked upon modern Catholicism as a degenerate 
system. Their position here was something like that of 
the English Tractarians in the earlier stages of the Oxford 
movement. Novalis composed " Marienlieder." Tieck 
complained of the dryness of Protestant ritual and the- 
ology, and said that in the Middle Ages there was a unity 
{Einheif) which ought to be again recovered. All Europe 
was then one fatherland with a single faith. The period 
of the Arthursage was the blossoming time of romance, 
the vernal season of love, religion, chivalry, and — sorcery ! 
He pleaded for the creation of a new Christian, Catholic 
mythology. 

In 1808 Friedrich Schlegel became a Roman Catholic 
— or, as Heine puts it — " went to Vienna, where he at- 
tended mass daily and ate broiled fowl." His wife, a 
daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, a Jewess by race, fol- 
lowed her husband into the Catholic Church. Zacharias 
Werner, author of a number of romantic melodramas, the 
heroes of which are described as monkish ascetics, relig- 
ious mystics, and " spirits who wander on earth in the 
guise of harp-players " — Zacharias Werner also went to 
Vienna and joined the order of Ligorians. This conver- 
sion made a prodigious noise in Germany. It occurred 
at Rome in 181 1, and the convert afterwards witnessed 
the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples, 
that annual miracle in which Newman expresses so firm 
a belief. Werner then spent two years in the study of 



The 1{pmanUc School in Germany. 149 

theology, visited Our Lady's Chapel at Loretto in 1813; 
was ordained priest at Aschaffenburg in 1814; and 
preached at St. Stephen's Church, Vienna, on the vanity 
of worldly pleasures, with fastings many, with castiga- 
tions and mortifications of the flesh. The younger Voss 
declared that Werner's religion was nothing but a poetic 
coquetting with God, Mary, the wounds of Christ, and 
the holy carbuncle {Karjunkelstem). He had been a 
man of dissolute life and had been divorced from three 
wives. " His enthusiasm for the restoration of the Mid- 
dle Ages," says Heine, "was one-sided; it applied only 
to the hierarchical, Catholic phase of mediaevalism; feu- 
dalism did not so strongly appeal to his fancy. . . . Pater 
Zacharias died in 1823, after sojourning for fifty-four 
years in this wicked, wicked world." Carlyle contrib- 
uted to the Foreign J^eviewin 1828 an essay on "Werner's 
Life and Writings," with translations of passages from 
his drama, "The Templars in Cyprus." 

But the conversion which caused the greatest scandal 
was that of Count Friedrich Stolberg, whose apostasy 
was denounced by his early friend Voss, the translator 
of Homer, in a booklet entitled " Wie ward Fritz Stol- 
berg ein Unfreier?" Voss showed, says Heine, that 
" Stolberg had secretly joined an association of the no- 
bility which had for its purpose to counteract the French 
ideas of liberty; that these nobles entered into a league 
with the Jesuits; that they sought, through the re-estab- 
lishment of Catholicism, to advance also the interests of 
the nobility." * 

The German literary historians agree that the fresh 
outbreak of romanticism in the last decade of the eigh- 
* For Stolberg see also vol. i., pp. 376-77. 



150 t/^ History of English 'Romanticism. 

teenth century was the resumption of an earlier movement 
which had been interrupted; that it was furthered by the 
new feeling of German nationality aroused by the Bona- 
partist tyranny; and finally that it was a protest against 
the flat mediocrity which ruled in the ultra-evangelical 
circle headed by Nicolai, the Berlin bookseller and edi- 
tor. Into this mere Philistinism had narrowed itself the 
nobler rationalism of Lessing, with its distrust of Trdu- 
merei and Schwdrmerei — of superstition and fanaticism. 
"Dry light is best," says Bacon, but the eye is hungry 
for colour, that has looked too steadily on the lumen siccum 
of the. reason; and then imagination becomes the prism 
which breaks the invisible sunbeam into beauty. Hence 
the somewhat extravagant romantic love of colour, and the 
determination to believe, at all hazards and even in the 
teeth of reason. Hence the imperfectly successful at- 
tempt to force back the modern mind into a posture of 
child-like assent to the marvellous. Tieck's " Mahrchen " 
and the Grimm brothers' nursery tales belong to this 
"renascence of wonder," like Lewis' "Tales of Terror," 
Scott's " Demonology," and Coleridge's " Christabel " in 
England. "The tendencies of 1770 to 1780," says 
Scherer, "which had now quite disappeared, asserted 
themselves with new and increased force. The nations 
which were groaning under Napoleon's oppression sought 
comfort in the contemplation of a fairer and grander 
past. Patriotism and mediaevalism became for a long 
time the watchwords and the dominating fashion of the 
day." 

Allowing for the differences mentioned, the romantic 
movements in England and Germany offer, as might be 
expected, many interesting parallels. Carlyle, writing 



The 'T^m antic School in Germany. 151 

in 1827,* says that the recent change in German litera- 
ture is only a part of a general change in the whole liter- 
ature of Europe. " Among ourselves, for instance, within 
the last thirty years, who has not lifted up his voice with 
double vigour in praise of Shakespeare and nature, and 
vituperation of French taste and French philosophy? 
Who has not heard of the glories of old English litera- 
ture; the wealth of Queen Elizabeth's age; the penury of 
Queen Anne's; and the inquiry whether Pope was a poet? 
A similar temper is breaking out in France itself, her- 
metically sealed as that country seemed to be against all 
foreign influences; and doubts are beginning to be enter- 
tained, and even expressed, about Corneille and the three 
unities. It seems to be substantially the same thing 
which has occurred in Germany, and been attributed to 
Tieck and his associates; only that the revolution which 
is here proceeding, and in France commencing, appears 
in Germany to be completed." 

In Germany, as in England — in Germany more than 
in England — other arts beside literature partook of the 
new spirit. The brothers Boissere'e agitated for the com- 
pletion of the " Kolner Dom," and collected their famous 
picture gallery to illustrate the German, Dutch, and Flem- 
ish art of the fifteenth century; just as Gothic came into 
fashion in England largely in consequence of the writ- 
ings of Walpole, Scott, and Ruskin. Like our own later 
Pre-Raphaelite group, German art critics began to praise 
the naive awkwardness of execution and devout spiritual- 
ity of feeling in the old Florentine painters, and German 
artists strove to paint like Era Angelico. Friedrich 
Schlegel gave a strong impulse to the study of mediaeval 

* " Ludwig Tieck " : Introductions to " German Romance. " 



152 <iA History of English Romanticism. 

art, and Heine scornfully describes him and his friend 
Joseph Gorres, rummaging about " among the ancient 
Rhine cities for the remains of old German pictures and 
statuary which were superstitiously worshipped as holy 
relics." Tieck and his friend Wackenroder brought back 
from their pilgrimage to Dresden in 1796 a devotion, a 
kind of sentimental Mariolatry, to the celebrated Madon- 
nas of Raphael and Holbein in the Dresden gallery ; 
and from their explorations in Niirnberg, that Ferle des 
Mittelalters^ an enthusiasm for Albrecht Diirer, This 
found expression in Wackenroder's " Herzensergiessun- 
gen eines Kunstliebenden Klosterbruders " ; and in 
Tieck's novel, " Sternbald's Wanderungen," in which he 
accompanies a pupil of Diirer to Rome. Wackenroder, 
like Tieck's other friend, Novalis, was of a consumptive, 
emotional, and somewhat womanish constitution of mind 
and body, and died young. Tieck edited his remains, 
including letters on old German art. The standard edi- 
tions of their joint writings are illustrated by engravings 
after Diirer, one of which in particular, the celebrated 
" Knight, Death, and the Devil/' symbolizes the mysteri- 
ous terrors of Tieck's own tales, and of German romance 
in general. The knight is in complete armour, and is 
riding through a forest. On a hilltop in the distance are 
the turrets of a castle; a lean hound follows the knight; 
on the ground between his horse's hoofs sprawls a lizard- 
like reptile; a figure on horseback approaches from the 
right, with the face half obliterated or eaten away to the 
semblance of a skull, and snakes encircling the temples. 
Behind comes on a demon or goblin shape, with a tall 
curving horn, which is "neither man nor woman, neither 
beast nor human," but one of those grotesque and ob- 



The l^mantic School in Germany. 153 

scene monsters which the mediaeval imagination sculp- 
tured upon the cathedrals. This famous copperplate 
prompted Fouque's romance, " Sintram and his Com- 
panions." He had received a copy of it for a birthday 
gift, and brooded for years over its mysterious signifi- 
cance; which finally shaped itself in his imagination into 
an allegory of the soul's conflict with the powers of dark- 
ness. His whole narrative leads up to the description 
of Diirer's picture, which occupies the twenty-seventh and 
climacteric chapter. The school of young German Pre- 
Raphaelite art students, associated at Rome in 1810 under 
the leadership of Overbeck and Cornelius, was considera- 
bly influenced by Wackenroder's " Herzensergiessungen." 

Music, too, and particularly church music, was affected 
by the new taste. The ancient music of the " Dies Irae" 
and other Latin hymns was revived; and it would not be 
far wrong to say that the romantic school sowed the seed 
of Wagner's great music-dramas, profoundly Teutonic and 
romantic in their subject matter and handling and in their 
application of the united arts of poetry, music, and scene- 
painting to old national legends such as "Parzival," 
"Tannhauser,"* "The Knight of the Swan," and the 
"Nibelungen Hoard." 

History, too, and Germanic philology took impulse 
from this fresh interest in the past. Johannes Miiller, in 
his "History of the Swiss Confederation" (1780-95), 
drew the first appreciative picture of mediaeval life, and 
caught, in his diction, something of the manner of the 
old chroniclers. As in England ancient stores of folk- 
lore and popular poetry were gathered and put forth by 

*Brentano's fragment "Die Erfindung des Rosenkranzes, " 
begun in 1803, deals with the Tannhauser story. 



154 c^ History of English 1{omanticism . 

Percy, Ritson, Ellis, Scott, and others, so in Germany the 
Grimm brothers' universally known collections of fairy 
tales, legends, and mythology began to appear.* Tieck 
published in 1803 his " Minnelieder aus dem Schwab- 
ischen Zeitalter." Karl Simrock made modern versions 
of Middle High German poetry. Uhland, whose "Wal- 
ther von der Vogelweide," says Scherer, "gave the 
first complete picture of an old German singer," carried 
the war into Africa by going to Paris in 18 10 and mak- 
ing a study of the French Middle Age. He introduced 
the old French epics to the German public, and is re- 
garded, with A. W. Schlegel, as the founder of romance 
philology in Germany, 

A pupil of Bodmer,f the Swiss Christian Heinrich 
Myller, had issued a complete edition of the "Nibelun- 
genlied" in 1784-85. The romantic school now took up 
this old national epic and praised it as a German Iliad, 
unequalled in sublimity and natural power. Uhland 
gave a great deal of study to it, and A. W. Schlegel lec- 
tured upon it at Berlin in 1801-2, Both Schlegel and 
Tieck made plans to edit it; and Friedrich von der 
Hagen, inspired by the former's lectures, published four 
editions of it, and a version in modern German. " For 
a long time," testifies Heine, " the ' Nibelungenlied ' was 
the sole topic of discussion among us. . . . It is difificult 
for a Frenchman to form a conception of this work, or 
even of the language in which it is written. It is a lan- 
guage of stone, and the verses are, as it were, blocks of 
granite." By way of giving his French readers a notion 

* " Kinder und Hausmahrchen " (1812-15). "Deutsche 
Sagen" (1816). " Deutsche Mythologie" (1835). 
f See vol. i., pp. 375-76. 



The 'T^omantic School in Germany. 155 

of the gigantic passions and rude, primitive strength of 
the poem, he imagines a battle of all the Gothic cathe- 
drals of Europe on some vast plain, and adds, "But no! 
even then you can form no conception of the chief char- 
acters of the ' Nibelungenlied'; no steeple is so high, no 
stone so hard as the fierce Hagen, or the revengeful 
Chrimhilde." 

Another work which corresponds roughly with Percy's 
"Reliques," asthe " Nibelungenlied" with Macpherson's 
"Ossian," was " Des Knaben Wunderhorn " (The Boy's 
Magic Trumpet), published in 1806-8 by Clemens Bren- 
tano and Achim von Arnim, with a dedication to Goethe. 
This was a three-volume collection of German songs, 
and although it came much later than Percy's, and after 
the imitation of old national balladry in Germany was 
already well under way, so that its relation to German 
romanticism is not of an initial kind, like that of Percy's 
collection in England; still its importance was very 
great. It influenced all the lyrical poetry of the Roman- 
tic school, and especially the ballads of Uhland. ** I 
cannot sufficiently extol this book," says Heine. "It 
contains the sweetest flowers of German poesy. . . . On 
the title page ... is the picture of a lad blowing a horn ; 
and when a German in a foreign land views this picture, 
he almost seems to hear the old familiar strains, and 
homesickness steals over him. ... In these ballads one 
feels the beating of the German popular heart. Here is 
revealed all its sombre merriment, all its droll wit. Here 
German wrath beats furiously the drum ; here German 
satire stings; here German love kisses. Here we behold 
the sparkling of genuine German wine, and genuine Ger- 
man tears." 



156 o^ History of English %omanticism. 

The German romantic school, like the English, but 
more learnedly and systematically, sought to reinforce its 
native stock of materials by motijs drawn from foreign 
literatures, and particularly from Norse mythology and 
from Spanish romance. Percy's translation of Malet: 
Gray's versions from the Welsh and the Scandinavian : 
Southey's " Chronicles of the Cid " and Lockhart's trans- 
lations of the Spanish ballads are paralleled in Germany 
by William Schlegel's, and Uhland's, and others' studies 
in old Norse mythology and poetry; by Tieck's transla- 
tion of " Don Quixote " * and by Johann Dietrich Gries' 
of Calderon. The romanticists, indeed, and especially 
Tieck and A. W. Schlegel, were most accomplished trans- 
lators. Schlegel's great version of Shakspere is justly 
esteemed one of the glories of the German tongue. 
Heine affirms that it was undertaken solely for polem- 
ical purposes and at a time (1797) when the enthusiasm 
for the Middle Ages had not yet reached an extravagant 
height. " Later, when this did occur, Calderon was 
translated and ranked far above Shakespeare. . . . For 
the works of Calderon bear most distinctly the impress 
of the poetry of the Middle Ages, particularly of the two 
principal epochs, knight-errantry and monasticism. The 
pious comedies of the Castilian priest-poet, whose poet- 
ical flowers had been besprinkled with holy water and 
canonical perfumes . . . were now set up as models, and 
Germany swarmed with fantastically pious, insanely pro- 
found poems, over which it was the fashion to work one's 

* "If Cervantes' purpose," says Heine, "was merely to de- 
scribe the fools who sought to restore the chivalry of the Mid- 
dle Ages, . . . then it is a peculiarly comic irony of accident 
that the romantic school should furnish the best translation of 
a book in which their own folly is most amusingly ridiculed." 



The 'T^mantic School in Germany. 157 

self into a mystic ecstasy of admiration, as in ' The De- 
votion to the Cross ' ; or to fight in honour of the Ma- 
donna, as in ' The Constant Prince.' . . . Our poetry 
said the Schlegels, is superannuated. . . . Our emotions 
are withered ; our imagination is dried up. . . . We must 
seek again the choked-up springs of the naive, simple 
poetry of the Middle Ages, where bubbles the elixir of 
youth." Heine adds that Tieck, following out this pre- 
scription, drank so deeply of the medieeval folk tales 
and ballads that he actually became a child again and 
fell to lisping. 

There is a suggestive analogy between the position of 
the Warton brothers in England and the Schlegel brothers 
in Germany. The Schlegels, like the Wartons, were 
leaders in the romantic movement of their time and coun- 
try, and were the inspirers of other men. The two pairs 
were alike also in that their best service was done in the 
field of literary history, criticism, and exposition, while 
their creative work was imitative and of comparatively 
small value. Friedrich Schlegel's scandalous romance 
" Lucinde " is of much less importance than his very 
stimulating lectures on the "History of Literature" and 
the " Wisdom and Languages of India " ; * and his elder 
brother, though an accomplished metrist and translator, 
was not successful in original verse. But this resem- 
blance between the Wartons and the Schlegels must not 
be pressed too far. Here, as at many other points, the 
German movement had greater momentum. The Wartons 
were men of elegant scholarship after their old-fashioned 

* F. Schlegel's declamations against printing and gun pow- 
der in his Vienna lectures of 1810 foretoken Ruskin's philip- 
pics against railways and factories. 



iS8 <^ History of English Romanticism. 

kind, a kind which joined the usual classical culture of 
the English universities to a liberal— and in their cen- 
tury somewhat paradoxical — enthusiasm in antiquarian 
pursuits. But the Schlegels were men of really wide 
learning and of depth in criticism. Compared with their 
scientific method and grasp of principles, the " Observa- 
tions " and " Essays " of the Wartons are mere dilettant- 
ism. To the influence of the Schlegels is not unfairly 
attributed the origin in Germany of the sciences of com- 
parative philology and comparative mythology, and the 
works of scholars like Bopp, Diez, and the brothers 
Grimm. Herder* had already traced the broad cosmo- 
politan lines which German literary scholarship was to 
follow, with German thoroughness and independence. 
And Heine acknowledges that "in reproductive criticism, 
where the beauties of a work of art were to be brought 
out clearly ; where a delicate perception of individualities 
was required; and where these were to be made intelli- 
gible, the Schlegels were far superior to Lessing." The 
one point at which the English movement outweighed 
the German was Walter Scott, whose creative vigour and 
fertility made an impact upon the mind of Europe to 
which the romantic literature of the Continent affords no 
counterpart. 

The principles of the Schlegelian criticism were first 
communicated to the English public by Coleridge; who, 
in his lectures on Shakspere and other dramatists, 
helped himself freely to William Schlegel's " Vorlesun- 
gen iiber dramatische Kunst und Litteratur," f Heine 

* See vol. i., pp. 300, 337, 416. 

f Vide stipra, p. 88. A. W. Schlegel was in England in 
1823. Tieck met Coleridge in England in 1818, having made 
his acquaintance in Italy some ten years before. 



The l^mantic School m Germany. 159 

denounces the shallowness of these principles and their 
failure to comprehend the modern mind. " When Schle- 
gel seeks to depreciate the poet Biirger, he compares his 
ballads with the old English ballads of the Percy col- 
lection, and he shows that the latter are more simple, 
more naive, more antique, and consequently more poet- 
ical. . . . But death is not more poetical than life. The 
old English ballads of the Percy collection exhale the 
spirit of their age, and Burger's ballads breathe the spirit 
of our time. The latter, Schlegel never understood. . . . 
What increased Schlegel's reputation still more was the 
sensation which he excited in France, where he also at- 
tacked the literary authorities of the French, . . . showed 
the French that their whole classical literature was worth- 
less, that Moliere was a buffoon and no poet, that Racine 
likewise was of no account . . . that the French are the 
most prosaic people of the world, and that there is no 
poetry in France," It is well known that Coleridge de- 
tested the French, as " a light but cruel race " ; that he 
undervalued their literature and even affected an igno- 
rance of the language. The narrowness of Schlegelian 
criticism was only the excess of Teutonism reacting 
against the previous excesses of Gallic classicism. 

The deficiency of creative imagination in the Schlegels 
was supplied by their disciple Ludwig Tieck, who made 
the " Mahrchen," or popular traditionary tale, his pecul- 
iar province. It was Wackenroder who first drew his 
attention to " those old, poorly printed Volksbitcher, with 
their coarse wood-cuts which had for centuries been cir- 
culating among the peasantry, and which may still be 
picked up at the book-stalls of the Leipzig fairs." * 
* Boyesen : "Aspects of the Romantic School." 



i6o ,t/J History of English Romanticism. 

Tieck's volume of " Volksmahrchen " (1797) gave repro- 
ductions of a number of these old tales, such as the 
" Haimonskinder," the " Schone Magelone," "Tann- 
hauser," and the " Schildbiirger," His "Phantasus" 
(18 1 2) contained original tales conceived in the same 
spirit. Scherer says that Tieck uttered the manifesto of 
German romanticism in the following lines from the 
overture of his " Kaiser Octavianus " : 

"Mondbeglanzte Zaubernacht, 
Die den .Sinn gefangen halt, 
Wundervolle Mahrchenwelt, 
Steig auf in der alten Pracbt ! " 

" Forest solitude " [ WaMeinsamkeit] , says Boyesen,* 
"churchyards at midnight, ruins of convents and baron- 
ial castles ; in fact, all the things which we are now apt 
to call romantic, are the favourite haunts of Tieck's muse. 
. . . Tieck was excessively fond of moonlight and liter- 
ally flooded his tales with its soft, dim splendour; there- 
fore moonlight is now romantic. . . . He never allows a 
hero to make a declaration of love without a near or dis- 
tant accompaniment of a bugle (^Schalmei or Waldhorn); 
accordingly the bugle is called a romantic instrument." 

"The true tone of that ancient time," says Carlyle,f 
"when man was in his childhood, when the universe 
within was divided by no wall of adamant from the uni- 
verse without, and the forms of the Spirit mingled and 
dwelt in trustful sisterhood with the forms of the Sense, 
was not easy to seize and adapt with any fitness of ap- 
plication to the feelings of modern minds. It was to 
penetrate into the inmost shrines of Imagination, where 

* Jl)id. 

\ "Ludwig Tieck," in "German Romance." 



The l^pm antic School in Germany. i6i 

human passion and action are reflected in dim and fitful, 
but deeply significant resemblances, and to copy these 
with the guileless, humble graces which alone can become 
them. . . . The ordinary lovers of witch and fairy matter 
will remark a deficiency of spectres and enchantments, 
and complain that the whole is rather dull. Cultivated 
free-thinkers, again, well knowing that no ghosts or elves 
exist in this country, will smile at the crack-brained 
dreamer, with his spelling-book prose and doggerel verse, 
and dismiss him good-naturedly as a German Lake poet." 
" In these works," says Heine, " there reigns a mysterious 
intenseness, a peculiar sympathy with nature, especially 
with the vegetable and mineral kingdoms. The reader 
feels himself transported into an enchanted forest; he 
hears the melodious gurgling of subterranean waters; at 
times he seems to distinguish his own name in the rus- 
tling of the trees. Ever and anon a nameless dread seizes 
upon him as the broad-leaved tendrils entwine his feet; 
strange and marvellous wild flowers gaze at him with 
their bright, languishing eyes; invisible lips mockingly 
press tender kisses on his cheeks; gigantic mushrooms, 
which look like golden bells, grow at the foot of the 
trees; large silent birds sway to and fro on the branches 
overhead, put on a sapient look and solemnly nod their 
heads. Everything seems to hold its breath; all is hushed 
in awed expectation; suddenly the soft tones of a hunter's 
horn are heard, and a lovely female form, with waving 
plumes on head and falcon on wrist, rides swiftly by on 
a snow-white steed. And this beautiful damsel is so ex- 
quisitely lovely, so fair; her eyes are of the violet's hue, 
sparkling with mirth and at the same time earnest, sin- 
cere, and yet ironical; so chaste and yet so full of tender 



1 62 <i/l History of Ettglisb 'Romanticism. 

passion, like the fancy of our excellent Ludwig Tieck. 
Yes, his fancy is a charming, high-born maiden, who in 
the forests of fairyland gives chase to fabulous wild beasts ; 
perhaps she even hunts the rare unicorn, which may only 
be caught by a spotless virgin." 

In 1827 Carlyle * published translations of five of 
Tieck's " Mahrchen," viz. : " The Fair-Haired Eckbert," 
"The Trusty Eckart," "The Elves," "The Runenberg," 
and " The Goblet." He mentioned that another tale had 
been already Englished — " The Pictures " (Die Gemalde). 
This version was by Connop Thirwall, who had also ren- 
dered "The Betrothal" in 1824. In spite of Carlyle's 
recommendations, Tieck's stories seem to have made 
small impression in England. Doubtless they came too 
late, and the romantic movement, by 1827, had spent its 
first force in a country already sated with Scott's poems 
and novels. Sarah Austin, a daughter of William Tay- 
lor of Norwich, went to Germany to study German litera- 
ture in this same year 1827. In her " Fragments from 
German Prose Writers" (1841), she speaks of the small 
success of Tieck's stories in England, but testifies that 
A. W. Schlegel's dramatic lectures had been translated 
early and the translation frequently reprinted. Another 
of the Norwich Taylors — Edgar — was the translator of 
Grimm's " Haus- und Kinder-Mahrchen." Julius Hare, 
who was at school at Weimar in the winter of 1804-5, 
rendered three of Tieck's tales, as well as Fouque's 
"Sintram" (1820). 

It is interesting to note that Tieck was not unknown to 
Hawthorne and Poe. The latter mentions his " Journey 
into the Blue Distance " in his " Fall of the House of 
* "German Romance," four vols., Edinburgh. 



The 'T{pmanttc School in Germany. 163 

Usher " ; and in an early review of Hawthorne's " Twice- 
Told Tales" (1842) and "Mosses from an Old Manse" 
(1846), at a time when their author was still, in his own 
words, " the obscurest man of letters in America," Poe 
acutely pointed out a resemblance between Hawthorne 
and Tieck; " whose manner," he asserts, " in some of his 
works, is absolutely identical with that habitual to Haw- 
thorne." One finds a confirmation of this apergu — or 
finds, at least, that Hawthorne was attracted by Tieck — 
in passages of the "American Note-Books," where he 
speaks of grubbing out several pages of Tieck at a sit- 
ting, by the aid of a German dictionary. Colonel Hig- 
ginson ("Short Studies"), apropos of Poe's sham learn- 
ing and his habit of mystifying the reader by imaginary 
citations, confesses to having hunted in vain for this fas- 
cinatingly entitled "Journey into the Blue Distance"; 
and to having been laughed at for his pains by a friend 
who assured him that Poe could scarcely read a word of 
German. But Tieck did really write this story, " Das 
Alte Buch : oder Reise ins Blaue hinein," which Poe 
misleadingly refers to under its alternate title. There 
is, indeed, a hint of allegory in Tieck's " Mahrchen " — 
which are far from being mere fairy tales — that reminds 
one frequently of Hawthorne's shadowy art — of such 
things as "Ethan Brand," or "The Minister's Black 
Veil," or "The Great Carbuncle of the White Moun- 
tains." There is, e.g.^ "The Elves," in which a little 
girl does but step across the foot-bridge over the brook 
that borders her father's garden, to find herself in a 
magic land where she stays, as it seems to her, a few 
hours; but returns home to learn that she has been absent 
seven years. Or there is " The Runenberg," where a 



164 e^ History of English l^omanticism. 

youth wandering in the mountains, receives from a sorcer- 
ess, through the casement of a ruined castle, a wondrous 
tablet set with gems in a mystic pattern; and years after- 
ward wanders back into the mountains, leaving home 
and friends to search for fairy jewels, only to return again 
to his village, an old and broken-down man, bearing a 
sackful of worthless pebbles which appear to him the 
most precious stones. And there is the story of " The 
Goblet," where the theme is like that of Hawthorne's 
" Shaker Bridal," a pair of lovers whose union is thwarted 
and postponed until finally, when too late, they find that 
only the ghost or the memory of their love is left to mock 
their youthful hope. 

But the mystic, par excellence, among the German ro- 
manticists was Novalis, of whose writings Carlyle gave 
a sympathetic account in the Foreign Reviezv for 1829. 
Novalis' " Hymns to the Night," written in Ossianic 
prose, were perhaps not without influence on Longfellow 
("Voices of the Night"), but his most significant work 
was his unfinished romance "Heinrichvon Ofterdingen." 
The hero was a legendary poet of the time of the Cru- 
sades, who was victor in a contest of minstrelsy on the 
Wartburg. But in Novalis' romance there is no firm 
delineation of mediaeval life — everything is dissolved 
in a mist of transcendentalism and allegory. The story 
opens with the words: "I long to see the blue flower; 
it is continually in my mind, and I can think of nothing 
else." Heinrich falls asleep, and has a vision of a won- 
drous cavern and a fountain, beside which grows a tall, 
light blue flower that bends towards him, the petals show- 
ing "like a blue spreading ruff in which hovered a lovely 
face." This blue flower, says Carlyle, is poetry, "the 



The l^pmantk School in Germany. 165 

real object, passion, and vocation of young Heinrich." 
Boyesen gives a subtler interpretation. "This blue 
flower," he says, " is the watchword and symbol of the 
school. It is meant to symbolise the deep and nameless 
longings of a poet's soul. Romantic poetry invariably 
deals with longing; not a definite formulated desire for 
some attainable object, but a dim mysterious aspiration, 
a trembling unrest, a vague sense of kinship with the 
infinite,* a consequent dissatisfaction with every form of 
happiness which the world has to offer. The object of 
the romantic longing, therefore, so far as it has any ob- 
ject, is the ideal, . . . The blue flower, like the absolute 
ideal, is never found in this world; poets may at times 
dimly feel its nearness, and perhaps even catch a brief 
glimpse of it in some lonely forest glade, far from the 
haunts of men, but it is in vain to try to pluck it. If for 
a moment its perfume fills the air, the senses are intoxi- 
cated and the soul swells with poetic rapture." f It 
would lead us too far afield to follow up the traces of this 
mystical symbolism in the writings of our New England 
transcendentalists. One is often reminded of Novalis' 
blue flower in such a poem as Emerson's " Forerunners," 
or Lowell's "Footpath," or Whittier's " Vanishers," or 
in Thoreau's little parable about the horse, the hound, 
and the dove which he had long ago lost and is still 
seeking. And again one is reminded of Tieck when 
Thoreau says : " I had seen the red election birds brought 
from their recesses on my comrades' strings and fancied 
that their plumage would assume stranger and more daz- 

* A. W. Schlegel says that romantic poetry is the represen- 
tation {Darstellntig) of the infinite through symbols, 
f "Novalis and the Blue Flower." 



1 66 zA History of English 'T^omanticism. 

zling colours in proportion as I advanced farther into the 
darkness and solitude of the forest." Heinrich von 
Ofterdingen travels to Augsburg to visit his grandfather, 
conversing on the way with various shadowy persons, a 
miner, a hermit, an Eastern maiden named Zulma, who 
represent respectively, according to Boyesen, the poetry 
of nature, the poetry of history, and the spirit of the 
Orient. At Augsburg he meets the poet Klingsohr (the 
personification, perhaps, of poetry in its full develop- 
ment). With his daughter Matilda he falls in love, 
whose face is that same which he had beheld in his 
vision, encircled by the petals of the blue flower. Then 
he has a dream in which he sees Matilda sink and disap- 
pear in the waters of a river. Then he encounters her in 
a strange land and asks where the river is. " Seest thou 
not its blue waves above us? " she answers. "He looked 
up and the blue river was flowing softly over their heads." 
"This image of Death, and of the river being the sky in 
that other and eternal country " * — does it not once more 
remind us of the well-known line in Channing's "A 
Poet's Hope "— 

"If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea" ; 
or of Emerson's " Two Rivers " : 

"Thy summer voice, Musketaquit, 
Repeats the music of the rain. 
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit 
Through thee, as thou through Concord plain " ? 

But transcendentalism is one thing and romanticism is 
another, and we may dismiss Novalis with a reminder of 
the fact that the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, once 
published at Concord, took for its motto a sentence from 

* Carlyle. 



Tbel^mantic School in Germany. 167 

his " Bliithenstaub " (Flower-pollen): " Philosophy can 
bake no bread, but she can procure for us God, freedom, 
and immortality." * 

Brentano and Von Arnim have had practically no influ- 
ence in England. Erentano's most popular story was 
translated by T. W. Appell, under the title, " Honour, 
or the Story of the Brave Casper and the Fair Annerl : 
With an Introduction and Biographical Notice" (Lon- 
don, 1847). The same story was rendered into French 
in the Correspondant iox 1859 (" Le Brave Kasperl et la 
Belle Annerl "). Three tales of Arnim were translated 
by The'ophile Gautier, as " Contes Bizarres " (Paris, 1856). 
Arnim's best romance is " Die Kronenwachter " (1817). 
Scherer testifies that this " combined real knowledge of 
the Reformation period with graphic power"; and adds: 
"It was Walter Scott's great example which, in the sec- 
ond decade of this century, first made conscientious faith- 
fulness and study of details the rule in historical novel- 
writing." Longfellow's " German Poets and Poetry " 
(1845) includes nothing from Arnim or Brentano. Nor 
did Thomas Roscoe's "German Novelists" (four vol- 
umes), nor George Soane's " Specimens of German Ro- 
mance," both of which appeared in 1826. 

The most popular of the German romanticists was 
Friedrich Baron de la Motte Fouque', the descendant of 
a family exiled from France by the Revocation of the 
Edict of Nantes, and himself an officer in the Prussian 
army in the war of liberation. Fouque's numerous ro- 
mances, in all of which he upholds the ideal of Christian 
knighthood, have been, many of them, translated into 

* Selections from Novalis in an English translation were 
published at London in 1891. 



1 68 <t/J History of English '^{pmanticism. 

English. "Aslauga's Knight" appeared in Carlyle's 
*' Specimens of German Romance " (1827); "Sintram," 
"Undine," and " Der Zauberring" had been translated 
even earlier. " Thiodolf the Icelander" and others have 
also been current in English circulating libraries. 
Carlyle acknowledges that Fouque's notes are few, and 
that he is possessed by a single idea. " The chapel and 
the tilt yard stand in the background or the foreground 
in all the scenes of his universe. He gives us knights, 
soft-hearted and strong-armed; full of Christian self- 
denial, patience, meekness, and gay, easy daring; they 
stand before us in their mild frankness, with suitable 
equipment, and accompaniment of squire and dame. . . . 
Change of scene and person brings little change of sub- 
ject; even when no chivalry is mentioned, we feel too 
clearly the influence of its unseen presence. Nor can it 
be said that in this solitary department his success is of 
the very highest sort. To body forth the spirit of 
Christian knighthood in existing poetic forms; to wed 
that old sentiment to modern thoughts, was a task which 
he could not attempt. He has turned rather to the fic- 
tions and machinery of former days." Heine says that 
Fouque's Sigurd the Serpent Slayer has the courage of 
a hundred lions and the sense of two asses. But Fouque's 
"Undine" (1811) is in its way a masterpiece and a 
classic. This story of the lovely water-sprite, who re- 
ceived a soul when she fell in love with the knight, and 
with a soul, a knowledge of human sorrow, has a slight 
resemblance to the conception of Hawthorne's '* Marble 
Faun." Coleridge was greatly fascinated by it. He 
read the original several times, and once the American 
translation, printed at Philadelphia. He said that it was 



The '^mantic School in Germariy. 169 

beyond Scott, and that Undine resembled Shakspere's 
Caliban in being a literal creation. 

But in general Fouque's chivalry romances, when 
compared with Scott's, have much less vigour, variety, 
and dramatic force, though a higher spirituality and a 
softer sentiment. The Waverley novels are solid with a 
right materialistic treatment. It was Scott's endeavour 
to make the Middle Ages real. The people are there, 
as well as chevaliers and their ladies. The history of 
the times is there. But in Fouque the Middle Ages be- 
come even more unreal, fairy-like, fantastic than they 
are in our imaginations. There is nothing but tourney- 
ing, love-making, and enchantment. Compare the rumour 
of the Crusades and Richard the Lion Heart in " Der 
Zauberring " with the stalwart flesh-and-blood figures in 
"Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." A wavering moon- 
shine lies all over the world of the Fouque romances, like 
the magic light which illumines the Druda's castle in 
" Der Zauberring," on whose battlements grow tall white 
flowers, and whose courts are filled with unearthly music 
from the perpetual revolution of golden wheels. "On 
the romantic side," wrote Richter, in his review of 
" L'Alleniagne " in the Yi%\^€i\)%xgJahrbucheriox\Z\z^, 
"we could not wish the Briton to cast his first glance 
at us; for the Briton — to whom nothing is so poetical as 
the common weal — requires (being used to the weight of 
gold), even for a golden age of poetry, the thick golden 
wing-cases of his epithet-poets; not the transparent gos- 
samer wings of the Romanticists; no many-coloured but- 
terfly dust; but, at lowest, flower-dust that will grow to 
something." 

Ax\ot\\QX Spdtromajitiker -who has penetrated to the Eng- 



170 z/1 History of English %omanticism. 

lish literary consciousness is the Swabian Ludwig Uhland, 
the sweetest lyric poet of the romantic school. Uhland 
studied the poems of Ossian, the Norse sagas, the " Nibe- 
lungenlied" and German hero legends, the Spanish ro- 
mances, the poetry of the trouveres and the troubadours, 
and treated motives from all these varied sources. His 
true field, however, was the ballad, as Tieck's was the 
popular tale ; and many of Uhland's ballads are favourites 
with English readers, through excellent translations. 
Sarah Austin's version of one of them is widely familiar: 

" Many a year is in its grave 
Since I crossed this restless wave, " etc. 

Longfellow translated three: "The Black Knight," 
" The Luck of Edenhall," and " The Castle by the Sea." 
It is to be feared that the last-named belongs to what 
Scherer calls that " trivial kind of romanticism, full of 
sadness and renunciation, in which kings and queens with 
crimson mantles and golden crowns, kings' daughters and 
beautiful shepherds, harpers, monks, and nuns play a 
great part," But it has a haunting beauty, and a dreamy 
melody like Goethe's "Es war ein Konig in Thule." 
The mocking Heine, who stigmatises Fouque's knights 
as combinations of iron and sentimentality, complains 
that in Uhland's writings too " the naive, rude, powerful 
tones of the Middle Ages are not reproduced with ideal- 
ised fidelity, but rather they are dissolved into a sickly, 
sentimental melancholy. . . . The women in Uhland's 
poems are only beautiful shadows, embodied moonshine; 
milk flows in their veins, and sweet tears in their eyes, 
i.e., tears which lack salt. If we compare Uhland's 
knights with the knights in the old ballads, it seems to 



'The l^omantic School in Germany. 1 7 1 

us as if the former were composed of suits of leaden 
armour, entirely filled with flowers, instead of flesh and 
bones. Hence Uhland's knights are more pleasing to 
delicate nostrils than the old stalwarts, who wore heavy 
iron trousers and were huge eaters and still huger drink- 
ers." 

Upon the whole it must be concluded that this second 
invasion of England by German romance, in the twenties 
and early thirties of the nineteenth century, made a lesser 
impression than the first irruption in, say, 1795 to 18 10, 
in the days of Biirger and " Gotz," and " The Robbers," 
and Monk Lewis and the youthful Scott. And the rea- 
son is not far to seek. The newcomers found England 
in possession of a native romanticism of a very robust 
type, by the side of which the imported article showed 
like a delicate exotic. Carlyle affirms that Madame de 
Stael's book was the precursor of whatever acquaintance 
with German literature exists in England. He himself 
worked valiantly to extend that acquaintance by his arti- 
cles in the Edi?iburgh and Foreign Review, and by his 
translations from German romance. But he found among 
English readers an invincible prejudice against German 
mysticism and German sentimentality. The romantic 
chiaroscuro, which puzzled Southey even in "The An- 
cient Mariner," became dimmest twilight in Tieck's 
"Mahrchen" and midnight darkness in the visionary 
Novalis. The Weichheit, Wehmtcth, and Sehnsucht nach 
der Unendlichkeit of the German romanticists were moods 
not altogether unfamiliar in English poetry. " Now stirs 
the feeling infinite," sings Byron. 

"Now more than ever seems it rich to die. 
To cease upon the midnight with no pain, " 



172 (i// History of English l^omanticism. 

cries Keats. But when Novalis, in his Todessehnsuchf^ 
exclaims, " Death is the romance of life," the sentiment 
has an alien sound. There was something mutually re- 
pellent between the more typical phases of English and 
German romanticism. Tieck and the Schlegels, we 
know, cared little for Scott. We are told that Scott read 
the Zeitimg Jiir Eiusiedler, but we are not told what he 
thought of it. Perhaps romanticism, like transcendental- 
ism, found a more congenial soil in New than in Old 
England. Longfellow spent the winter of 1835-36 in 
Heidelberg, calling on A. W. Schlegel at Bonn, on his 
way thither. " Hyperion " (1839) ^^ saturated with Ger- 
man romance. Its hero, Paul Flemming, knew " Des 
Knaben Wunderhorn " almost by heart. No other Ger- 
man book had ever exercised such " wild and magic in- 
fluence upon his imagination." 



CHAPTER V. 

^be IRomanttc Movement in ffrancc* 

French romanticism had aspects of its own which dis- 
tinguished it from the English and the German alike. It 
differed from the former and agreed with the latter in 
being organised. In France, as in Germany, there was 
a romantic school, whose members were united by com- 
mon literary principles and by personal association. 
There were sharply defined and hostile factions of classics 
and romantics, with party cries, watchwords, and shibbo- 
leths; a propaganda carried on and a polemic waged in 
pamphlets, prefaces, and critical journals. Above all 
there was a leader. Walter Scott was the great romancer 
of Europe, but he was never the head of a school in his 
own country in the sense in which Victor Hugo was in 
France, or even in the sense in which the Schlegels were 
in Germany. Scott had imitators, but Hugo had disci- 
ples. 

* It is scarcely necessary to say that no full-length picture 
of the French romantic movement is attempted in this chap- 
ter, but only such a sketch as should serve to illustrate its re- 
lation to English romanticism. For the history of the move- 
ment, besides the authorities quoted or referred to in the text. 
I have relied principally upon the following : Petit de Julle- 
ville : "Histoire de la Litterature Frangaise, " Tome vii., 
Paris, 1899. Brunetiere : "Manual of the History of French 
Literature " (authorized translation) , New York, 1898. L. 
Bertrand : "La Fin du Classicisme, " Paris, 1897. Adolphe 
Jullien : "Le Romantisme et L'Editeur Renduel," Paris, 
1897. I have also read somewhat widely, though not exhaus- 

173 



174 <^ History of English l^manticism. 

One point in which the French movement differed from 
both the English and the German was in the suddenness 
and violence of the outbreak. It was not so much a 
gradual development as a revolution, an explosion. The 
reason of this is to be found in the firmer hold which 
academic tradition had in France, the fountainhead of 
eighteenth-century classicism. Romanticism had a spe- 
cial work to do in the land of literary convention in as- 
serting the freedom of art and the unity of art and life. 
Everything that is in life, said Hugo, is, or has a right 
to be in art. The French, in political and social matters 
the most revolutionary people of Europe, were the most 
conservative in matters of taste. The Revolution even 
intensified the reigning classicism by giving it a republi- 
can turn. The Jacobin orators appealed constantly to 
the examples of the Greek and Roman democracies. The 
Goddess of Reason was enthroned in place of God. Sun- 
day was abolished, and the names of the months and of 
the days of the week were changed. Dress under the 
Directory was patterned on antique modes — the liberty 
cap was Phrygian — and children born under the Repub- 

tively, in the writings of the French romantics themselves, 
including Hugo's early poems and most of his dramas and 
romances; Nodier's " Contes en prose et en verse " ; nearly 
all of Musset's works in prose and verse ; ditto of Theophile 
Gautier's; Stendhal's "La Chartreuse de Parme," "Le 
Rouge et le Noir," "Racine et Shakespeare," "Lord Byron 
en Italie," etc. ; Vigny's "Chatterton, " "Cinq-Mars," and 
many of his Scriptural poems; Balzac's " Les Chouans"; 
Merimee's "Chronique de Charles IX.," and most of his 
" Nouvelles " ; Chateaubriand' s " Le Genie du Christianisme " ; 
some of Lamartine's "Meditations " ; most of George Sand's 
novels, and a number of Dumas' ; many of Sainte-Beuve's 
critical writings ; and the miscellanies of Gerard de Nerval 
(Labrunie). Of many of these, of course, no direct use or 
mention is made in the present chapter. 



The '^mantle [Movement in France. 175 

lie were named after Roman patriots, Brutus, Cassius, etc. 
The great painter of the Revolution was David,* who 
painted his subjects in togas, with backgrounds of Greek 
temples. Voltaire's classicism was monarchical and held 
to the Louis XIV. tradition ; David's was republican. 
And yet the recognised formulae of taste and criticism 
were the same in 1800 as in 1775, or in 1675. 

A second distinction of the French romanticism was 
its local concentration at Paris. The centripetal forces 
have always been greater in France than in England and 
Germany. The earlier group of German Roinantiker -^z.^^ 
indeed, as we have seen, united for a time at Jena and 
Berlin ; and the Spatro7Jiantiker at Heidelberg. But this 
was dispersion itself as compared with the intense focus- 
sing of intellectual rays from every quarter of France 
upon the capital. In England, I hardly need repeat, 
there was next to no cohesion at all between the widely 
scattered men of letters whose work exhibited romantic 
traits. 

In one particular the French movement resembled the 
English more nearly than the German. It kept itself 
almost entirely within the domain of art, and did not 
carry out its principles with German thoroughness and 
consistency into politics and religion. It made no efforts 
towards a practical restoration of the Middle Ages. At 
the beginning, indeed, French romanticism exhibited 
something analogous to the Toryism of Scott, and the 
reactionary y//«/(rrw« and neo-Catholicism of the Schle- 

* "II a pour I'art du moyenage, un mepris voisin de la de- 
mence et de la frenesie. . . . Voir le discours ou il propose de 
mutiler les statues des rois de la faQade de Notre-Dame, pour 
en former un piedestal a la statue du peuple frangais." Ber- 
trand : "La Fin du Classicisme," pp. 302-3 and note. 



176 c/^ History of English l^omanticism, 

gels. Chateaubriand in his " Genie du Christianisme " 
attempted a sort of aesthetic revival of Catholic Christian- 
ity, which had suffered so heavily by the deistic teachings 
of the last century and the atheism of the Revolution. 
Victor Hugo began in his "Odes et Ballades" (1822) 
as an enthusiastic adherent of monarchy and the church. 
"L'histoire des hommes," he wrote, "ne presente de 
podsie que jugee du haut des idees monarchiques et re- 
ligieuses," But he advanced quite rapidly towards liber- 
alism both in politics and religion. And of the young 
men who surrounded him, like Gautier, Labrunie, Sainte- 
Beuve, Musset, De Vigny, and others, it can only be af- 
firmed that they were legitimist or republican, Catholic 
7 or agnostic, just as it happened and without affecting their 
fidelity to the literary canons of the new school.* The 
German romanticism was philosophical; the French was 
artistic and social. The Parisian ateliers as well as the 
Parisian salo?is were nuclei of revolt against classical 
traditions. " This intermixture of art with poetry," says 
Gautier,f " was and remains one of the characteristic 
marks of the new school, and enables us to understand 
why its earliest recruits were found more among artists 
than among men of letters. A multitude of objects, 
images, comparisons, which were believed to be irreduci- 
ble to words, entered into the language and have stayed 
there. The sphere of literature was enlarged, and now 
includes the sphere of art in its measureless circle." 
" At that time painting and poetry fraternised. The art- 
ists read the poets and the poets visited the artists. 

* But see, for the Catholic reaction in France, the writings 
of Joseph de Maistre, especially "Du Pape " (1819). 
•j- " Histoire du Romantisme " (1874). 



7be 'Tipmantic cMovement in France. 177 

Shakspere, Dante, Goethe, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott 
were to be found in the studio as in the study. There 
were as many splotches of colour as of ink on the mar- 
gins of those beautiful volumes that were so incessantly 
thumbed. Imaginations, already greatly excited by them- 
selves, were heated to excess by the reading of those for- 
eign writings of a colouring so rich, of a fancy so free 
and so strong. Enthusiasm mounted to delirium. It 
seemed as if we had discovered poetry, and that was in- 
deed the truth. Now that this fine flame has cooled and 
that the positive-minded generation which possesses the 
world is preoccupied with other ideas, one cannot imagine 
what dizziness, what eblouissement was produced in us by 
such and such a picture or poem, which people nowadays 
are satisfied to approve by a slight nod of the head. 
It was so new, so unexpected, so lively, so glowing! " * 

The romantic school in France had not only its poets, 
dramatists, and critics, but its painters, architects, sculp- 
tors, musical composers, and actors. The romantic artist 
par excellence was Eugene Delacroix, the painter of " The 
Crusaders Entering Jerusalem. " The Greeks and Ro- 
mans had been so abused by the decadent school of 
David that they fell into complete disrepute at this time. 
Delacroix's first manner was purely romantic, that is to 
say, he borrowed nothing from the recollections or the 
forms of the antique. The subjects that he treated were 
relatively modern, taken from the history of the Middle 
Ages, from Dante, Shakspere, Goethe, Lord Byron, or 
Walter Scott." He painted " Hamlet," " The Boat of 
Dante," "Tasso in Bedlam," "Marino Faliero," "The 
Death of Sardanapalus," " The Combat of the Giaour and 
* Ibid., 210. 



178 <i/J History of English %omanticism. 

the Pasha," "The Massacre of the Bishop of Lie'ge," and 
similar subjects. Goethe in his conversations with Eck- 
erman expressed great admiration of Delacroix's inter- 
pretations of scenes in " Faust " (the brawl in Auerbach's 
cellar, and the midnight ride of Faust and Mephistopheles 
to deliver Margaret from prison). Goethe hoped that 
the French artist would go on and reproduce the whole 
of " Faust," and especially the sorceress' kitchen and the 
scenes on the Brocken. Other painters of the romantic 
school were Camille Roqueplan, who treated motives 
drawn from " The Antiquary " and other novels of Walter 
Scott;* and Eugene Deveria, whose ''Birth of Henry 
IV.," executed in 1827, when the artist was only twenty- 
two years of age, was a masterpiece of colouring and 
composition. The house of the Deveria brothers was 
one of the rallying points of the Parisian romanticists. 
And then there was Louis Boulanger, who painted "Ma- 
zeppa " and " The Witches' Sabbath " (" La Ronde du 
Sabbat "f); and the water-colour painter and engraver, 
Celestin Nanteuil, who furnished innumerable designs 
for vignettes, frontispieces, and book illustrations to the 
writers of the romantic school. 

"Of all the arts," says Gautier, "the one that lends 
itself least to the expression of the romantic idea is qer- 
tainly sculpture. It seems to have received from antiq- 
uity its definitive form. . . . What can the statuary art 
do without the gods and heroes of mythology who furnish 
it with plausible pretexts for the nude, and for such 

* Heine counted, in the Salon of 183 1, more than thirty pic- 
tures inspired by Scott. 

f Also " Le Roi Lear " (Salon of 1836) and " La Procession 
du Pape des Fous " (aquarelle) for Hugo's "Notre-Dame de 
Paris." 



The T{omantic [Movement in France. 179 

drapery as it needs ; things which romanticism prescribes, 
or did at least prescribe at that time of its first fervour? 
Every sculptor is of necessity a classic." * Nevertheless, 
he says that the romantic school was not quite unpro- 
vided of sculptors. " In our inner circle (c^nade), Jehan 
du Seigneur represented this art, austere and rebellious 
to the fancy. . . . Jehan du Seigneur — let us leave in his 
name of Jean this mediaeval h which made him so happy 
and made him believe that he wore the apron of Ervein 
of Steinbach at work on the sculptures of Strasburg min- 
ster." Gautier mentions among the productions of this 
Gothic-minded statuary an " Orlando Furioso," a bust of 
Victor Hugo, and a group from the latter's romance, 
" Notre Dame de Paris," the gipsy girl Esmeralda giving 
a drink to the humpback Quasimodo. It was the en- 
deavour of the new school, in the arts of design as well 
as in literature, to introduce colour, novelty, picturesque- 
ness, character. They studied the great Venetian and 
Flemish colourists, neglected under the reign of David, 
and " in the first moments of their fury against le poncif 
dassique, they seemed to have adopted the theory of art 
of the witches in 'Macbeth' — Fair is foul and foul is 
fair " ; f i.e., they neglected a traditional beauty in favour 
of the diaraderistic. " They sought the true, the new, the 
picturesque perhaps more than the ideal ; but this re- 
action was certainly permissible after so many Ajaxes, 
Achilleses, and Philocteteses." 

It is not quite so easy to understand what is meant by 
romanticism in music as in literature. But Gautier 

* Recall Schlegel's saying that the genius of the classic 
drama was plastic and that of the romantic picturesque, 
f Gautier, 192. 



i8o c/^ History of English l^omanticism. 

names a number of composers as adhering to the roman- 
tic school, among others, Hippolyte Monpon, who set to 
music "the leaping metres, the echo-rimes, the Gothic 
counter-points of Hugo's ' Odes et Ballades ' and songs 
like Musset's ' L'Andalouse ' — 

' Avez vous vu dans Barcelone, ' 

He believed like us in serenades, alcaldes, mantillas, 
castinets; in all that Italy and that Spain, a trifle con- 
ventional, which was brought into fashion by the author 
of ' Don Paez,' of ' Portia,' and of the ' Marchioness of 
Amalgui,' . . . 'Gastibelza, the Man with the Cara- 
bine,' and that guitar, so profoundly Spanish, of Victor 
Hugo, had inspired Monpon with a savage, plaintive air, 
of a strange character, which long remained popular, and 
which no romanticist — if any such is left — has forgotten." 
A greater name than Monpon was Hector Berlioz, the 
composer of " Romeo and Juliette " and " The Damnation 
of Faust." Gautier says that Berlioz represented the ro- 
mantic idea in music, by virtue of his horror of common 
formulag, his breaking away from old models, the complex 
richness of his orchestration, his fidelity to local colour 
(whatever that may mean in music), his desire to make 
his art express what it had never expressed before, "the 
tumultuous and Shaksperian depth of the passions, rev- 
eries amorous or melancholy, the longings and demands 
of the soul, the indefinite and mysterious feelings which 
words cannot render." Berlioz was a passionate lover of 
German music and of the writings of Shakspere, Goethe, 
and Scott. He composed overtures to " Waverley," 
" King Lear," and " Rob Roy " ; a cantata on " Sardan- 
apalus," and music for the ghost scene in " Hamlet " and 



The l^manttc [Movement in France. i8i 

for Goethe's ballad, "The Fisher." He married an Eng- 
lish actress whom he had seen in the parts of Ophelia, 
Portia, and Cordelia. Berlioz efi revanche was better 
appreciated in Germany than in France, where he was 
generally considered mad; where his "Symphonic fan- 
tastique " produced an effect analogous to that of the 
first pieces of Richard Wagner; and where "the sympho- 
nies of Beethoven were still thought barbarous, and pro- 
nounced by the classicists not to be music, any more than 
the verses of Victor Hugo were poetry, or the pictures of 
Delacroix painting." And finally there were actors and 
actresses who came to fill their roles in the new roman- 
tic dramas, of whom I need mention only Madame Dor- 
val, who took the part of Hugo's Marion Delorme, What 
Gautier tells us of her is significant of the art that she 
interpreted; that her acting was by sympathy, rather than 
calculation; that it was intensely emotional; that she 
owed nothing to tradition; her tradition was essentially 
modern, dramatic rather than tragic* 

Romanticism in France was, in a more special_sense 
than in Germany and England^ an effort for^freedom, 
passion, originality, as against rule, authority, conven- 
tion. "Romanticism," says Victor Hugo,f "so many 
times poorly defined, is nothing else than liberalis77i in 
literature,... • . Lite rary libert y is the child of politi cal 
IjbfiLll^. . . . After so many great things which our fa- 
thers have done and which we have witnessed, here we are, 
issued forth from old forms of society; why should we 
not issue out of the old forms of poetry? A new people, 

* This is a distinction more French than English : la trag- 
idle vs. le draine. 

f Preface to "Hernani." 



x82 <t/l History of English 'T{pmanticism. 

a new art. While admiring the literature of Louis XIV., 
so well adapted to his monarchy, France will know how to 
have its own literature, peculiar, personal, and national — 
this actual France, this France of the nineteenth century 
to which Mirabeau has given its freedom and Napoleon 
its power." And again : * " What I have been pleading 
for is the liberty of art as against the despotism of sys- 
tems, codes, and rules. It is my habit to follow at all 
hazards what I take for inspiration, and to change the 
mould as often as I change the composition. Dogmatism 
in the arts is what I avoid above all things. God forbid 
that I should aspire to be of the numtj^r of those, either 
romantics or. classics, who make works according to their 
system; who condemn themselves never to have more than 
one form in mind, to always be proving something, to 
follow any other laws than those of their organization 
and of their nature. The artificial work of such men as 
those, whatever talents they may possess, does not exist for 
art. It is a theory, not a poetry." It is manifest that a 
literary reform undertaken in this spirit would not long 
consent to lend itself to the purposes of political or 
religious reaction, or to limit itself to any single influence 
like mediaevalism, but would strike out freely in a multi- 
tude of directions; would invent new forms and adapt old 
ones to its material ; and would become more and more 
modern, various, and progressive. And such, in fact, 
was the history of Victor Hugo's intellectual develop- 
ment and of the whole literary movement in France which 
began with him and with De Stendhal (Henri Beyle). 
Th i s asse rti on of the freedom of th e individual artis t was 
naturally accompaniedwith certain extravagances. "To 
* Preface to "Cromwell." 



The l^omanttc CMovement in France. 183 

develop freely all the caprices of thought," says Gautier,* 
"even if they shocked taste, cp.nveri.tion, and rulei.._to hate 
and' repel to the utmost what Horace calls ih^ prqfanum 
vulgus, and what the moustached and hairy rapins call 
grocers, philistines, or bourgeois; to celebrate love with 
warmth enough to burn the paper (that they wrote on) ; 
to set it up as the only end and only means of happiness; 
to sanctify and deify art, regarded as a second creator; 
such are the donnees of the programme which each sought 
to realise according to his strength; the ideal and the 
secret postulations of the young romanticists," 

Inasmuch as the French romantic school, even more 
than the English and the German, was a breach with tradi- 
tion and an insurrection against existing conditions, it will 
be well to notice briefly what the particular situation was 
which the romanticists in France confronted, "To un- 
derstand what this movement was and what it did," says 
Saintsbury,f "we must point out more precisely what 
were the faults of the older literature, and especially of 
the literature of the late eighteenth century. They were, 
in the first place, an extremely impoverished vocabulary, 
no recourse being had to the older tongue for picturesque 
archaisms, and little welcome being given to new phrases, 
however appropriate and distinct. In the second place, 
the adoption, especially in poetry, of an exceedingly con- 
ventional method of speech, describing everything where 
possible by an elaborate periphrasis, and avoiding di- 
rect and simple terms. Thirdly, in all forms of litera- 
ture, but especially in poetry and drama, the accept- 
ance for almost every kind of work of cut-and-dried 

* "Histoire du Romantisme, " p. 64. 

f "Primer of French Literature," p. 115. 



184 <vf History of English l^omanticistn. 

patterns,* to which it was bound to conform. We have 
already pointed out that this had all but killed the tragic 
drama, and it was nearly as bad in the various accepted 
forms of poetry, such as fables, epistles, odes, etc. Each 
piece was expected to resemble something else, and origi- 
nality was regarded as a mark of bad taste and insufficient 
culture. Fourthly, the submission to a very limited and 
very arbitrary system of versification, adapted only to the 
production of tragic alexandrines, and limiting even that 
form of verse to one monotonous model. Lastly, the 
limitation of the subject to be treated to a very few 
classes and kinds." If to this description be added a 
paragraph from Gautier's "Histoiredu Romantisme," we 
shall have a sufficient idea of the condition of French 
literature and art before the appearance of Victor Hugo's 
"Odes et Ballades" (1826). "One cannot imagine to 
what a degree of insignificance and paleness literature 
had come. Painting was not much better. The last 
pupils of David were spreading their wishywashy colours 
over the old Graeco-Roman patterns. The classicists 
found that perfectly beautiful; but in the presence of 
these masterpieces, their admiration could not keep them 
from putting their hands before their mouths to cover a 
yawn ; a circumstance, however, that failed to make them 
any more indulgent to the artists of the new school, 
whom they called tattooed savages and accused of paint- 
ing with a drunken broom." One is reminded by Mr. 
Saintsbury's summary of many features which we have 
observed in the English academicism of the eighteenth 

* One of the principles of the romanticists was the melange 
des genres, whereby the old lines between tragedy and com- 
edy, e.g., were broken down, lyricism admitted into the 
drama, etc. 



7he l^mantic (Movement in France. 185 

century; the impoverished vocabulary, e.g., which makes 
itself evident in the annotations on the text of Spenser 
and other old authors; the horror of common terms, and 
the constant abuse of the periphrasis — the "gelid cis- 
tern," the " stercoraceous heap," the "spiculated pal- 
ings," and the "shining leather that encased the limb." 
And the heroic couplet in English usage corresponds very 
closely to the French alexandrine. In their dissatisfac- 
tion with the paleness and vagueness of the old poetic 
diction, and the monotony of the classical verse, the new 
school innovated boldly, introducing archaisms, neolo- 
gisms, and all kinds of exotic words and popular locutions, 
even argot ox Parisian slang; and trying metrical experi- 
ments of many sorts. Gautier mentions in particular one 
Theophile Dondey (who, after the fashion of the school, 
anagrammatised his name into Philothe'e O'Neddy) as pre- 
senting this caractere (Toiitrance et de tensioii. " The word 
paroxyste, employed for the first time by Nestor Roque- 
plan, seems to have been invented with an application to 
Philothee. Everything \s ponsse in tone, high-coloured, 
violent, carried to the utmost limits of expression, of an 
aggressive originality, almost dripping with the unheard- 
of {ruissilant cV inouisme) ; but back of the double-horned 
paradoxes, sophistical maxims, incoherent metaphors, 
swoln hyperboles, and words six feet long, are the poetic 
feeling of the time and the harmony of rhythm." One 
hears much in the critical writings of that period, of the 
mot propre, the 7'ei's litre, and the rime brisL It was in 
tragedy especially that the periphrasis reigned most 
tyrannically, and that the introduction of the mot propre, 
i.e., of terms that were precise, concrete, familiar, tech- 
nical even, if needful, horrified the classicists. It was 



i86 c// History of English %omaniicism. 

beneath the dignity of the muse — the elegant muse of the 
Abbe Delille — Hugo tells us, to speak naturally. " She 
underlines," in sign of disapprobation, "the old Cor- 
neille for his way of saying crudely 

'Ah, ne me brouillez pas avec la republique.' 
She still has heavy on her heart his Tou^ beau, monsieur. 
And many a seigneur and many a madame was needed to 
make her forgive our admirable Racine his chiens so 
monosyllabic. . . . History in her eyes is in bad tone 
and taste. How, for example, can kings and queens who 
swear be tolerated? They must be elevated from their 
royal dignity to the dignity of tragedy. ... It is thus 
that the king of the people (Henri IV.) polished by M. 
Legouve, has seen his vejitre-saint-gris shamefully driven 
from his mouth by two sentences, and has been reduced, 
like the young girl in the story, to let nothing fall from 
this royal mouth, but pearls, rubies, and sapphires — all of 
them false, to say the truth." It seems incredible to an 
Englishman, but it is nevertheless true that at the first 
representations of "Hernani" in 1830, the simple ques- 
tion and answer 

"Est il minuit? — Minuit bientot " 
raised a tempest of hisses and applause, and that the op- 
posing factions of classics and romantics " fought three 
days over this hemistich. It was thought trivial, famil- 
iar, out of place; a king asks what time it is like a com- 
mon citizen, and is answered, as if he were a farmer, 
midnight. Well done! Now if he had only used some 

fine periphrasis, e.g. : 

I'heure 

Atteindra bientot sa derniere demeure.* 

* Stendhal, writing in 1823 ("Racine et Shakspere"), com- 



7he 1{omantic ^Movement in France. 187 

If they could not away with definite words in the verse, 
they endured very impatiently, too, epithets, metaphors, 
comparisons, poetic words — lyricism, in short; those 
swift escapes into nature, those soarings of the soul above 
the situation, those openings of poetry athwart drama, so 
frequent in Shakspere, Calderon, and Goethe, so rare in 
our great authors of the eighteenth century." Gautier 
gives, as one reason for the adherence of so many art- 
ists to the romantic school, the circumstance that, being ac- 
customed to a language freely intermixed with technical 
terms, the motpropre had nothing shocking for them ; while 
their special education as artists having put them into inti- 
mate relation with nature, " they were prepared to feel the 
imagery and colours of the new poetry and were not at 
all repelled by the precise and picturesque details so dis- 
agreeable to the classicists. . . . You cannot imagine 
the storms that broke out in the parterre of the Theatre 
Frangais, when the ' Moor of Venice,' translated by 

plains that "it will soon be thought bad form to say, on the 
French stage, ' Ferniez cctie fenetre' [window]: we shall 
have to say, ' Fertnez cette croisee' [casement]. Two-thirds 
of the words used in the parlours of the best people {du meil- 
letir ton) cannot be reproduced in the theatre. M. Legouve, 
in his tragedy ' Henri IV., ' could not make use of the patriot 
king's finest saying, 'I could wish that the poorest peasant 
in my kingdom might, at the least, have a chicken in his pot 
of a Sunday.' English and Italian verse allows the poet to 
say everything ; and this good French word pot would have 
furnished a touching scene to Shakspere' s humblest pupil. 
But la tragMie racinienne, with its style noble and its arti- 
ficial dignity, has to put it thus, — in four alexandrines : 

"' Je veux enfin qu'au jour marque pour le repos, 
L'hote laborieux des modestes hameaux, 
Sur sa table moins humble, ait, par ma bienfaisance, 
Quelques-uns de ces mets reserves a I'aisance. '" 

It was Stendhal (whose real name was Henri Beyle) who 
said that Paris needed a chain of mountains on its horizon. 



i88 isA History of English 'Romanticism. 

Alfred de Vigny, grinding his teeth, reiterated his de- 
mands for that handkerchief (tnouchoir) prudently denom- 
inated bandeau (head-band, fillet) in the vague Shakspere 
imitation of the excellent Ducis. A bell was called ' the 
sounding brass'; the sea was * the humid element,' or 
' the liquid element,' and so on. The professors of rhet- 
oric were thunderstruck by the audacity of Racine, who 
in the ' Dream of Athalie ' had spoken of dogs as dogs — 
molossi would have been better — and they advised young 
poets not to imitate this license of genius. Accordingly 
the first poet who wrote bell {cloche) committed an enor- 
mity; he exposed himself to the risk of being cut by his 
friends and excluded from society." * 

As to the alexandrine, the recognised verse of French 
tragedy, Victor Hugo tells us,f that many of the reform- 
ers, wearied by its monotony, advocated the writing of 
plays in prose. He makes a plea, however, for the re- 
tention of the alexandrine, giving it greater richness and 
suppleness by the displacement of the caesura, and the 
free use of e7ija7nbe7tieiit or run-over lines; just as Leigh 
Hunt and Keats broke up the couplets of Pope into a 
freer and looser form of verse. " Hernani " opened with 
an enjambement 

"Serait ce deja lui? C'est bien a I'escalier 
Derobe. " 

This was a signal of fight — a challenge to the classicists 
— and the battle began at once, with the very first lines 
of the play.;j; In his dramas Hugo used the alexandrine, 
but in his lyric poems, his wonderful resources as a 

*Gautier, i88. 

f "Cromwell, " 1827. 

X Gautier, 107. 



'The Romantic ^Movement in France. 189 

metrist were exhibited to the utmost in the invention of 
the most bizarre, eccentric, and original verse forms. An 
example of this is the poem entitled "The Djinns" in- 
cluded in "Les Orientales" (1829), The coming and 
going of the flying cohort of spirits is indicated by the 
crescendo effect of the verse, beginning with a stanza in 
lines of two syllables, rising gradually to the middle 
stanza of the poem in lines of ten syllables, and then 
dying away by exactly graded diminutions to the final 

stanza : 

"On doute 
La nuit — 
J'ecoute 
Tout fuit, 
Tout passe : 
L'espace 
Efface 
Le bruit." * 

But the earlier volume of "Odes et Ballades" (1826) 
offers many instances of metrical experiments hardly less 
ingenious. In "La Chasse du Burgrave" every rime is 
followed by an echo word, alike in sound but different in 
sense : 

"II part, et Madame Isabelle, 

Belle, 
Dit gaiement du haut des remparts : 

' Pars ! ' 
Tous las chasseurs sent dans la plaine, 

Pleine 
D'ardents seigneurs, de s^nechaux 

Chauds." 

The English reader is frequently reminded by Hugo's 
verses of the queer, abrupt, and outrS measures, and fan- 

*Musset's fantastic "Ballade a la Lune, " exaggerates the 
romantic so decidedly as to seem ironical. It is hard to say 
whether it is hj'perbole or parody. See Petit de Julleville, 
vol. vii., p. 652. 



iQo <^ History of English '^{omanticism. 

tastic rimes of Robert Browning. Compare with the 
above, e.g., his " Love among the Ruins." 

"Where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles 
Miles and miles 
On the solitary pastures where our sheep. 
Half asleep," etc. 

From the fact, alread}'' pointed out, that the romantic 
movement in France was, more emphatically than in Eng- 
land and Germany, a breach with the native literary tra- 
dition, there result several interesting peculiarities. The 
first of these is that the new French school, instead of 
fighting the classicists with weapons drawn from the old 
arsenal of mediaeval France, went abroad for allies;. went 
especially to the modern writers of England and Ger- 
many. This may seem strange when we reflect that 
French literature in the Middle Ages was the most influ- 
ential in Europe; and that, from the old heroic song of 
Roland in the eleventh century down to the very popular 
court allegory, the " Roman de la Rose ", in the fourteenth, 
and to the poems of Villon in the fifteenth, it afforded a 
rich treasure-house of romantic material in the shape of 
chronicles, chatisons de geste, ro?}ia?is (Taventures, fabliaux, 
lais, legends of saints, homilies, miracles, songs, farces, 
jeiispartis, pastourelles, ballades — of all the literary forms 
in fact which were then cultivated. Nor was this mass 
of work entirely without influence on the romanticists of 
1830. Theophile Dondey, wrote a poem on Roland; 
and Gerard de Nerval (Labrunie) hunted up the old pop- 
ular songs and folklore of Touraine and celebrated their 
naivete and truly national character. Attention was di- 
rected to the Renaissance group of poets who preceded 
the Louis XIV. writers — to Ronsard and "The Pleiade." 



The l^mantic {Movement in France. 191 

Later the Old French Text Society was founded for the 
preservation and publication of mediaeval remains. But 
in general the innovating school sought their inspiration 
in foreign literatures. Antony Deschamps translated 
the " Inferno " ; Alfred de Vigny translated " Othello " as 
the "Moor of Venice" (1829), and wrote a play on the 
story of Chatterton,* and a novel, " Cinq Mars," which is 
the nearest thing in French literature to the historical 
romances of Scott. f Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo 
were both powerfully impressed by Macpherson's "Os- 
sian." Gerard de Nerval made, at the age of eighteen, 
a translation of " Faust " (1828), which Goethe read with 
admiration, and wrote to the translator, saying that he 
had never before understood his own meaning so well. 
" It was a difficult task at that time," says Gautier, " to 
render into our tongue, which had become excessively 
timid, the bizarre and mysterious beauties of this ultra- 
romantic drama. . . . From his familiarity with Goethe, 
Uhland, Biirger and L. Tieck, Gerard retained in his 
turn of mind a certain dreamy tinge which sometimes 
made his own works seem like translations of unknown 
poets beyond the Rhine. . . . The sympathies and the 
studies of Ge'rard de Nerval drew him naturally towards 
Germany, which he often visited and where he made fruit- 
ful sojourns; the shadow of the old Teutonic oak hovered 
more than once above his brow with confidential mur- 
murs; he walked under the lindens with their heart- 
shaped leaves; on the margin of fountains he saluted 
the elf whose white robe trails a hem bedewed by the 
green grass; he saw the ravens circling around the moun- 

*See vol. i., pp. 372-73. 
f Gautier, 163. 



192 nA History of English '^{omanticism. 

tain of Kyffhausen; the kobolds came out before him 
from the rock clefts of the Hartz, and the witches of the 
Brocken danced their grand Walpurgisnight round about 
the young French poet, whom they took for a Jena stu- 
dent. . . . He knows how to blow upon the postillion's 
horn,* the enchanted melodies of Achim von Arnim and 
Clement Brentano; and if he stops at the threshold of 
an inn embowered in hop vines, the Schoppeti becomes 
in his hands the cup of the King of Thule." Among 
the French romanticists of Hugo's circle there was a 
great enthusiasm for wild German ballads like Burger's 
"Lenore" and Goethe's " Erl-King." The translation 
of A. W. Schlegel's "Vorlesungen iiber Dramatische 
Kunst und Litteratur," by Madame Necker de Saussure, 
in 18 1 4, was doubtless the first fruits of Madame de 
Stael's "Allemagne," published the year before. Gau- 
tier himself and his friend Augustus Mac-Keat (Auguste 
Maguet) collaborated in a drama founded on Byron's 
" Parisina." " Walter Scott was then in the full flower 
of his success. People were being initiated into the 
mysteries of Goethe's ' Faust,' . . . and discovering 
Shakspere under the translation, a little dressed up, of 
Letourneur; and the poems of Lord Byron, ' The Corsair,' 
' Lara,' ' The Giaour,' * Manfred,' ' Beppo,' ' Don Juan,' 
were coming to us from the Orient, which had not yet 
grown commonplace." Gautier said that in le petit cena- 
cle — the inner circle of the initiated — if you admired 
Racine more than Shakspere and Calderon, it was an 
opinion that you would do well to keep to yourself. 
" Toleration is not the virtue of neophytes." As for 
himself, who had set out as a painter — and only later de- 
*"Des Knabeu Wunderhorn. " 



The l^mantic [Movement in France. 193 

viated into letters — he was all for the Middle Ages: "An 
old iron baron, feudal, ready to take refuge from the en- 
croachments of the time, in the castle of Goetz von Ber- 
lichingen." Of Bouchardy, the extraordinary author of 
"Le Sonneur de Saint Paul," who "was to Hugo what 
Marlowe was to Shakspere " — and who was playfully 
accused of making wooden models of the plots of his 
melodramas — Gautier says that he " planned his singular 
edifice in advance, like a castle of Anne Radcliffe, with 
donjon, turrets, underground chambers, secret passages, 
corkscrew stairs, vaulted halls, mysterious closets, hiding 
places in the thickness of the walls, oubliettes, charnel- 
houses, crypts where his heroes and heroines were to 
meet later on, to love, hate, fight, set ambushes, assas- 
sinate, or marry. . . . He cut masked doors in the walls 
for his expected personage to appear through, and trap 
doors in the floor for him to disappear through." 

The reasons for this resort to foreign rather than native 
sources of inspiration are not far to seek. The romantic 
movement in France was belated ; it was twenty or thirty 
years behind the similar movements in England and 
Germany. It was easier and more natural for Stendhal 
or Hugo to appeal to the example of living masters like 
Goethe and Scott, whose works went everywhere in trans- 
lation and who held the ear of Europe, than to revive an 
interest all at once in Villon or Guillaume de Lorris or 
Chrestien de Troyes. Again, in no country had the di- 
vorce between fashionable and popular literature been so 
complete as in France; in none had so thick and hard a 
crust of classicism overlain the indigenous product of 
the national genius. It was not altogether easy for 
Bishop Percy in 1765 to win immediate recognition from 



194 ^ History of English Romanticism. 

the educated class for Old English minstrelsy; nor for 
Herder and Biirger in 1770 to do the same thing for the 
German ballads. In France it would have been impossi- 
ble before the Bourbon restoration of 1815. In England 
and in Germany, moreover, the higher literature had al- 
ways remained more closely in touch with the people. 
In both of those countries the stock of ballad poetry and 
folklore was much more extensive and important than in 
France, and the habit of composing ballads lasted later. 
The only French writers of the classical period who pro- 
duced anything at all analogous to the German "Mahr- 
chen " were Charles Perrault, who published between 
1691-97 his famous fairy tales, including "Blue Beard," 
''The Sleeping Beauty," "Little Red Riding-Hood," 
"Cinderella," and "Puss in Boots"; and the Countess 
d'Aulnoy (died 1720), whose "Yellow Dwarf" and 
" White Cat " belong to the same department of nursery 
tales.* 

A curious feature of French romanticism was the way 
in which the new-found liberty of art asserted itself in 
manners, costume, and personal habits. Victor Hugo 
himself was scrupulously correct and subdued in dress, 
but his young disciples affected bright colours and rich 
stuffs. They wore Spanish mantillas, coats with large 
velvet lapels, pointed doublets or jerkins of satin or 
damask velvet in place of the usual waistcoat; long hair 
after the Merovingian fashion, and pointed beards. We 
have seen that Shenstone was regarded as an eccentric, 
and perhaps somewhat dangerous, person when at the 
university, because he wore his own hair instead of a 
wig. In France, half a century later, not only iheper- 
* Charles Nodier vindicated the literary claims of Perrault 



The '^mantic ^Movement in France. 195 

ruque, but the menton glabre was regarded as sympto- 
matic of the classicist and the academician ; while the 
beard became a badge of romanticism. At the beginning 
of the movement, Gautier informs us, "there were only 
two full beards in France, the beard of Eugene Deve'ria 
and the beard of Petrus Borel. To wear them required 
a courage, a coolness, and a contempt for the crowd truly 
heroic. ... It was the fashion then ir- the romantic 
school to be pale, livid, greenish, a trifle cadaverous, if 
possible. It gave one an air of doom, '2>^xorv\z^ giao2irish, 
devoured by passion and remorse." It will be remem- 
bered that the rolling Byronic collar, open at the throat, 
was much affected at one time by young persons of ro- 
mantic temperament in England ; and that the conserva- 
tive classes, who adhered to the old-fashioned stock and 
high collar, looked askance upon these youthful innova- 
tors as certainly atheists and libertines, and probably 
enemies to society — would-be corsairs or banditti. It is 
interesting, therefore, to discover that in France, too, the 
final touch of elegance among the romantics was not to 
have any white linen in evidence; the shirt collar, in 
particular, being " considered as a mark of the grocer, 
the bourgeois, the philistine." A certain gilet rouge 
which Gautier wore when he led the claque at the first 
performance of " Hernani " has become historic. This 
flamboyant garment — a defiance and a challenge to the 
academicians who had come to hiss Hugo's play — was, 
in fact, 2i J) ourpoi?it or jerkin of cherry-coloured satin, cut 
in the shape of a Milanese cuirass, pointed, busked, and 
arched in front, and fastened behind the back with hooks 
and eyes. From the imperturbable disdain with which 
the wearer faced the opera-glasses and laughter of the 



196 c/f History of English Romanticism. 

assembly it was evident that it would not have taken 
much urging to induce him to come to the second night's 
performance decked in a daffodil waistcoat.* The young 
enthusiasts of k petit cenacle C2ixx\e.d their Byronism so far 
that, in imitation of the celebrated revels at Newstead, 
they used to drink from a human skull in their feasts at 
A' Petit Moulin Rouge. It had belonged to a drum-major, 
and Gerard de Nerval got it from his father, who had 
been an army surgeon. One of the neophytes, in his ex- 
citement, even demanded that it be filled with sea water 
instead of wine, in emulation of the hero of Victor Hugo's 
novel, "Han d'Islande," who "drank the water of the 
seas in the skull of the dead." Another cap2it tnortuum 
stood on Hugo's mantelpiece in place of a clock.f " If it 
did not tell the hour, at least it made us think of the ir- 
reparable flight of time. It was the verse of Horace trans- 
lated into romantic symbolism." There was a decided 
flavour of Bohemianism about the French romantic school, 
and the spirit of the lives which many of them led may 
best be studied in Murger's classic, " La Vie de Boheme." \ 
As another special feature of French romanticism, we 
may note the important part taken by the theatre in the 
history of the movement. The stage was the citadel of 
classical prejudice, and it was about it that the fiercest 
battles were fought. The climacteric year was 1830, in 
which year Victor Hugo's tragedy, " Hernani, or Castil- 
ian Honour," was put on at the Theatre Frangais on Feb- 
ruary 25th, and ran for thirty nights. The representation 
was a fight between the classics and the romantics, and 

*Gautier, 92. 

f Rue Jean-Gougon, where the cenacle met often. 
X Nerval banged himself at Paris, in January, 1855, in the 
rue de la Vielle Lanterne. 



The 'T^omantic [Movement in France. 197 

there was almost a mob in the theatre. The dramatic 
censorship under Charles X., though strict, was used in 
the interest of political rather than aesthetic orthodoxy. 
But it is said that some of the older Academicians actu- 
ally applied to the king to forbid the acting of " Her- 
nani." Gautier has given a mock-heroic description of 
this famous literary battle quorum pars magna Juit. He 
had received from his college friend, Gerard de Nerval 
— who had been charged with the duty of drumming up 
recruits for the Hugonic claque — six tickets to be dis- 
tributed only to tried friends of the cause — sure men and 
true. The tickets themselves were little squares of red 
paper, stamped in the corner with a mysterious counter- 
sign — the Spanish v^'oxd hierro, iron, not only symbolizing 
the hero of the drama, but hinting that the ticket-holder 
was to bear himself in the approaching fray frankly, 
bravely, and faithfully like the sword. The proud recip- 
ient of these tokens of confidence gave two of them to a 
couple of artists — ferocious romantics, who would gladly 
have eaten an Academician, if necessary; two he gave to 
a brace of young poets who secretly practised la ri?ne 
riche,Ie mot propre^ and la metaphore exacte : the other two 
he reserved for his cousin and himself. The general at- 
titude of the audience on the first nights was hostile, 
" two systems, two parties, two armies, two civilizations 
even — it is not saying too much — confronted one an- 
other, . . . and it was not hard to -see that yonder young 
man with long hair found the smoothly shaved gentle- 
man opposite a disastrous idiot; and that he would not 
long be at pains to conceal his opinion of him." The 
classical part of the audience resented the touches of 
Spanish local colour in the play, the mixture of pleas- 



198 c^ History of English T^omanticism. 

Entries and familiar speeches with the tragic dialogue, 
and of heroism and savagery in the character of Hernani; 
and they made all manner of fun of the species of pun 
— de ta suite, j' en siiis — which terminated the first act, 
"Certain lines were captured and recaptured, like dis- 
puted redoubts, by each army with equal obstinacy. On 
one day the romantics would carry a passage, which the 
enemy would retake the next day, and from which it be- 
came necessary to dislodge them. What uproar, what 
cries, cat-calls, hisses, hurricanes of bravos, thunders of 
applause! The heads of parties blackguarded each other 
like Homer's heroes before they came to blows. , . . For 
this generation ' Hernani' was what the 'Cid' was for the 
contemporaries of Corneille. All that was young, brave, 
amorous, poetic, caught the inspiration of it. Those fine 
exaggerations, heroic, Castilian; that superb Spanish 
emphasis; that language so proud and high even in its 
familiarity ; those images of a dazzling strangeness, threw 
us into an ecstasy and intoxicated us with their heady 
poetry." The victory in the end was with the new school. 
Musset, writing in 1838, says that the tragedies of Cor- 
neille and Racine had disappeared from the French stage 
for ten years. 

Another triumphant battlefield — a veritable Jete ro- 
mantique — was the first representation in 183 1 of Alex- 
andre Dumas' " Anthony." " It was an agitation, a 
tumult, an effervescence. . . . The house was actually 
delirious; it applauded, sobbed, wept, shouted. A cer- 
tain famous green coat was torn from the author's back 
and rent into shreds by his too ardent admirers, who 
wanted pieces of it for memorabilia." * 
*Gautier, 167. 



The Romantic [Movement in France. 199 

The English reader who hears of the stubborn resist- 
ance offered to the performance of ' Hernani ' will natu- 
rally suppose that there must have been something about 
it contrary to public policy — some immorality, or some 
political references, at least, offensive to the government; 
and he will have a difficulty in understanding that the 
trouble was all about affairs purely literary. " Hernani " 
was fought because it violated the unities of place and 
time; because its hero was a Spanish bandit; because in 
the dialogue a spade was called a spade, and in the verse 
the lines overlap. The French are often charged with 
frivolity in matters of conduct, but to the discussion of 
matters of art they bring a most serious conscience. The 
scene in "Hernani" shifts from Saragossa to the castle 
of Don Ruy Gomez de Silva in the mountains of Arra- 
gon, and to the tomb of Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle. 
The time of the action, though not precisely indicated, 
covers at least a number of months. The dialogue is, in 
many parts, nervous, simple, direct, abrupt; in others 
running into long tirades and soliloquies, rich with all the 
poetic resources of the greatest poet who has ever used the 
French tongue. The spirit of the drama, as well as its 
form, is romantic. The point of honour is pushed to a 
fantastic excess; all the characters display the most deli- 
cate chivalry, the noblest magnanimity, the loftiest Castil- 
ian pride. Don Ruy Gomez allows the King to carry off 
his bride, rather than yield up the outlaw who has taken 
refuge in his castle; and that although he has just 
caught this same outlaw paying court to this same 
bride, whose accepted lover he is. Hernani, not to be 
outdone in generosity, offers his life to his enemy and 
preserver, giving him his horn and promising to come to 



200 <tA History of English l^manticism. 

meet his death at its summons. There is the same fault 
here which is felt in Hugo's novels. Motives are exag- 
gerated, the dramatis persoiice strut. They are rather 
over-dramatic in their poses — melodramatic, in fact — 
and do unlikely things. But this fault is the fault of a 
great nature, grandeur exalted into grandiosity, till the 
heroes of these plays, " Hernani," "Marion Delorme," 
" Le Roi d'Amuse," loom and stalk across the scene like 
epic demigods of more than mortal stature and mortal 
passions. But Hugo was not only a great dramatist and 
a great poet, but a most clever playwright. " Hernani " 
is full of effective stage devices, crises in the action 
which make an audience hold its breath or shudder; 
moments of intense suspense like that in the third act, 
where the old hidalgo pauses before his own portrait, 
behind which the outlaw is hidden ; or that in the fifth, 
where Hernani hears at first, faint and far away, the blast 
of the fatal horn that summons him to leave his bride at 
the altar and go to his death. The young romantics of 
the day all got *' Hernani " by heart and used to rehearse 
it at their assemblies, each taking a part; and the famous 
trumpet, the cor cf Hernani^ became a symbol and a rally- 
ing call. 

No such scene would have been possible in an Eng- 
lish playhouse as that which attended the first represen- 
tation of " Hernani " at the Theatre Frangais. For not 
only is an English audience comparatively indifferent to 
rules of art and canons of taste, but the unities had never 
prevailed in practice in England, though constantly rec- 
ommended in theory. The French had no Shakspere, 
and the English no Academy. We may construct an 
imaginary parallel to such a scene if we will suppose 



The T^mantic iMovement hi France. 201 

that all reputable English tragedies from 1600 down to 
1830 had been something upon the model of Addison's 
" Cato " and Johnson's " Irene " ; or better still upon the 
model of Dryden's heroic plays in rimed couplets; and 
that then a drama like "Romeo and Juliet" had been 
produced upon the boards of Drury Lane, and a warm 
spurt of romantic poetry suddenly injected into the icy 
current of classic declamation. 

Having considered the chief points in which the 
French romantic movement differed from the similar 
movements in England and Germany, let us now glance 
at the history of its beginnings, and at the work of a 
few of its typical figures. The presentation of " Her- 
nani " in 1830 was by no means the first overt act of 
the new school. Discussion had been going on for 
years in the press. De Stendhal says that the classi- 
cists had on their side two-thirds of the Academic Fran- 
^aise, and all of the French journalists; that their lead- 
ing organ, however, was the very \n^\xQnX.i2.\ Joiifnal des 
Debuts and its editor, M. Dussant, the general-in-chief 
of the classical party. The romanticists, however, were 
not without organs of their own ; among which are espe- 
cially mentioned Le Conservateur Liiteraire, begun in 
1819, Le Globe in 1824, and the Annales Romantiques 
in 1823, the last being "practically a kind of annual of 
the Muse Fran^aise (1823-24), which had pretty nearly 
the same contributors." All of these journals were 
Bourboniste, except Le Globe, which was liberal in poli- 
tics.* The Academy denounced the new literary doc- 

* The romanticism of the Globe was of a more conservative 
stripe than that of the Muse Frani^aise, which was the organ 
of the group of young poets who surrounded Hugo. The 
motto of the latter was /idii nova progenies caelo demittitur 



202 t-A History of English Romanticism. 

trine as a heresy and its followers as a sect, but it made 

head so rapidly that as early as 1829, a year before 

" Hernani " was acted, a " Histoire du Romantisme en 

France " appeared, written by a certain M. de Toreinx.* 

It agrees with other authorities in dating the beginning 

of the movement from Chateaubriand's " Le Genie du 

Christianisme " (1802). " Chateaubriand," says Gautier, 

" may be regarded as the grandfather, or, if you prefer it, 

the sachem of romanticism in France. In the ' Genius 

of Christianity' he restored the Gothic cathedral; in the 

' Natchez ' he reopened the sublimity of nature, which 

had been closed; in ' Rene ' he invented melancholy and 

modern passion." 

Sprung from an ancient Breton family, Chateaubriand 

came to America in 1790 with the somewhat singular and 

very French idea of travelling overland to the northwest 

passage. He was diverted from this enterprise, however, 

alio. The Globe defined romanticism as Protestantism in let- 
ters. The critical battle was on as early as 1824. On April 
24, in that year, Auger, director of the Academy, read at the 
annual session of the Institute a discourse on romanticism, 
which he denounced as a literary schism. The prospectus of 
the Globe, an important document on the romantic side, dates 
from the same year. The Constitutiojuiel, the most narrowly 
classical of the opposing journals, described romanticism as an 
epidemic malady. To the year 1825, when the Cenacle had 
its headquarters at Victor Hugo's house, belong, among oth- 
ers, the following manifestoes on both sides of the controversy : 
"Les Classiques Venges," De la Touche ; " Le Temple du 
Romantisme," Morel; "Le Classique et le Romantique " (a 
satirical comedy in the classical interest) , Baour-Lormian. 
Cyprien Desmarais' " Essais sur les classiques et les roman- 
tiques " had appeared at Paris in 1823. At Rouen was printed 
in 1826 "Du Classique et du Romantique," a collection of pa- 
pers read at the Rouen Academy during the year, rather 
favorable, on the whole, to the new movement. 

* This is now a somewhat rare book ; I have never seen a 
copy of it ; but it was reviewed in T/ie Saturday Review (vol, 
Ixv. , p. 369). 



The l{pmantic iMovement in France. 203 

fell in with an Indian tribe and wandered about with 
them in the wilderness. He did not discover the north- 
west passage, but, according to Lowell, he invented the 
forest primeval. Chateaubriand gave the first full utter- 
ance to that romantic note which sounds so loudly in 
Byron's verse; the restless dissatisfaction with life as 
it is, the longing for something undefined and unattain- 
able, the love for solitude and the desert, the " passion 
incapable of being converted into action " — in short, the 
pialadie dii siecle — since become familiar in " Childe Har- 
old " and in Senancour's ^'Obermann." In one of the 
chapters* of "Le Genie du Christianisme" he gives an 
analysis of this modern melancholy, this Byronic satiety 
and discontent, which he says was unknown to the an- 
cients. "The farther nations advance in civilization, the 
more this unsettled state of the passions predominates; 
for then our imagination is rich, abundant, and full of 
wonders; but our existence is poor, insipid, and destitute 
of charms. With a full heart we dwell in an empty 
world." " Penetrate into those forests of America coeval 
with the world; what profound silence pervades these 
retreats when the winds are husht ! What unknown voices 
when they begin to rise! Stand still and everything is 
mute; take but a step and all nature sighs. Night ap- 
proaches, the shades thicken ; you hear herds of wild 
beasts passing in the dark; the ground murmurs under 
your feet; the pealing thunder rebellows in the deserts; 
the forest bows, the trees fall, an unknown river rolls 
before you. The moon at length bursts forth in the east; 
as you proceed at the foot of the trees, she seems to move 
before you on their tops and solemnly to accompany your 
* Part ii., Book iii., chap ix. 



2 04 <^ History of English 'Romanticism. 

steps. The wanderer seats himself on the trunk of an oak 
to await the return of day; he looks alternately at the 
nocturnal luminary, the darkness, and the river; he feels 
restless, agitated, and in expectation of something ex- 
traordinary; a pleasure never felt before, an unusual fear, 
cause his heart to throb, as if he were about to be ad- 
mitted to some secret of the Divinity; he is alone in the 
depth of the forests, but the mind of man is equal to the 
expanse of nature, and all the solitudes of the earth are 
not too vast for the contemplations of his heart. There 
is in man an instinctive melancholy, which makes him 
harmonise with the scenery of nature. Who has not 
spent whole hours seated on the bank of a river, contem- 
plating its passing waves? Who has not found pleasure 
on the seashore in viewing the distant rock whitened by 
the billows? How much are the ancients to be pitied, 
who discovered in the ocean naught but the palace of 
Neptune and the cavern of Proteus; it was hard that they 
should perceive only the adventures of the Tritons and 
the Nereids in the immensity of the seas, which seems to 
give an indistinct measure of the greatness of our souls, 
and which excites a vague desire to quit this life, that 
we may embrace all nature and taste the fulness of joy 
in the presence of its Author." * 

The outbreak of the Revolution recalled Chateaubriand 
to France. He joined the army of the emigrees at Cob- 
lentz, was wounded at the siege of Thionville, and es- 
caped into England where he lived (1793-1800) until the 
time of the Consulate, when he made his peace with 
Napoleon and returned to France. He had been a free- 
thinker, but was converted to Christianity by a dying 
* Part ii. , Book iv. , chap. i. 



The l^omanttc ^Movement in France. 205 

message from his mother who was thrown into prison by 
the revolutionists. "I wept," said Chateaubriand, "and 
I believed." "Le Genie du Christianisme" was an ex- 
pression of that reactionary feeling which drove numbers 
of Frenchmen back into the Church, after the blas- 
phemies and horrors of the Revolution. It came out 
just when Napoleon was negotiating his Co?icordat with 
the Pope, and was trying to enlist the religious and con- 
servative classes in support of his government; and it 
reinforced his purposes so powerfully that he appointed 
the author, in spite of his legitimism, to several diplo- 
matic posts. "Le Genie du Christianisme" is indeed a 
plea for Christianity on aesthetic grounds — an attempt, 
as has been sneeringly said, to recommend Christianity 
by making it look pretty. Chateaubriand was not a close 
reasoner; his knowledge was superficial and inaccurate; 
his character was weakened by vanity and shallowness. 
He was a sentimentalist and a rhetorician, but one of 
the most brilliant of rhetoricians; while his sentiment, 
though not always deep or lasting, was for the nonce 
sufficiently sincere. He had in particular a remarkable 
talent for pictorial description ; and his book, translated 
into many tongues, enjoyed an extraordinary vogue. The 
English version, made in 1815, was entitled "The Beau- 
ties of Christianity." For Chateaubriand undertook to 
show that the Christian religion had influenced favorably 
literature and the fine arts; that it was more poetical 
than any other system of belief and worship. He com- 
pared Homer and Vergil with Dante, Tasso, Milton, and 
other modern poets, and awarded the palm to the latter 
in the treatment of the elementary relations and stock 
characters, such as husband and wife, father and child, 



2o6 ft/f History of English l^manticism. 

the priest, the soldier, the lover, etc. ; preferring Pope's 
Eloisa, e.g:, to Vergil's Dido, and " Paul and Virginia" 
to the idyls of Theocritus. He pronounced the Chris- 
tian mythology — angels, devils, saints, miracles — su- 
perior to the pagan; and Dante's Hell much more 
impressive to the imagination than Tartarus. He dwelt 
eloquently upon the beauty and affecting significance of 
Gothic church architecture, of Catholic ritual and sym- 
bolism, the dress of the clergy, the crucifix, the organ, the 
church bell, the observances of Christian festivals, the 
monastic life, the orders of chivalry, the countr)' church- 
yards where the dead were buried, and even upon the 
superstitions which the last century had laughed to scorn; 
such as the belief in ghosts, the adoration of relics, vows 
to saints and pilgrimages to holy places. In his chap- 
ter on "The Influence of Christianity upon Music," he 
says that the " Christian religion is essentially melodious 
for this single reason, that she delights in solitude"; the 
forests are her ancient abode, and her musician " ought 
to be acquainted with the melancholy notes of the waters 
and the trees; he ought to have studied the sound of the 
winds in cloisters, and those murmurs that pervade the 
Gothic temple, the grass of the cemetery, and the vaults 
of death." He repeats the ancient fable that the design- 
ers of the cathedrals were applying forest scenery to 
architecture: "Those ceilings sculptured into foliage of 
different kinds, those buttresses which prop the walls and 
terminate abruptly like the broken trunks of trees, the 
coolness of the vaults, the darkness of the sanctuary, the 
dim twilight of the aisles, the chapels resembling grottoes, 
the secret passages, the low doorways, in a word every- 
thing in a Gothic church reminds you of the labyrinths 



The Romantic {Movement in France. 207 

of a wood, everything excites a feeling of religious awe, 
of mystery, and of the Divinity." The birds perch upon 
the steeples and towers as if they were trees, and " the 
Christian architect, not content with building forests, has 
been desirous to retain their murmurs, and by means of 
the organ and of bells, he has attached to the Gothic 
temple the very winds and the thunders that roll in the 
recesses of the woods. Past ages, conjured up by these 
religious sounds, raise their venerable voices from the 
bosom of the stones and sigh in every corner of the vast 
cathedral. The sanctuary re-echoes like the cavern of 
the ancient Sibyl; loud-tongued bells swing over your 
head; while the vaults of death under your feet are pro- 
foundly silent." He praises the ideals of chivalry; 
gives a sympathetic picture of the training and career of 
a knight-errant, and asks: "Is there then nothing worthy 
of admiration in the times of a Roland, a Godfrey, a 
Coucey, and a Joinville; in the times of the Moors and 
the Saracens; . . . when the strains of the Troubadours 
were mingled with the clash of arms, dances with relig- 
ious ceremonies, and banquets and tournaments with 
sieges and battles? " Chateaubriand says that the finest 
Gothic ruins are to be found in the English lake country, 
on the Scotch mountains, and in the Orkney Islands; 
and that they are more impressive than classic ruins 
because in the latter the arches are parallel with the 
curves of the sky, while in the Gothic or pointed archi- 
tecture the arches "form a contrast with the circular 
arches of the sky and the curvatures of the horizon. 
The Gothic being, moreover, entirely composed of voids, 
the more readily admits of the decoration of herbage and 
flowers than the fulness of the Grecian orders. The 



2o8 <^ History of English Romanticism. 

clustered columns, the domes carved into foliage, or 
scooped out in the form of a fruit-basket, offered so many 
receptacles into which the winds carry, with the dust, the 
seeds of vegetables. The house-leek fixes itself in the 
mortar; the mosses cover rugged masses with their elas- 
tic coating ; the thistle projects its brown burrs from the 
embrasure of a window; and the ivy creeping along the 
northern cloisters falls in festoons over the arches." 

All this is romantic enough ; we have the note of Catho- 
lic medisevalism and the note of Ossianic melancholy 
combined; and this some years before "The Lay of the 
Last Minstrel," and when Byron was a boy of fourteen and 
still reading his Ossian.* But we are precluded from 
classifying Chateaubriand among full-fledged roman- 
ticists. His literary taste was by no means emancipated 
from eighteenth-century standards. In speaking of Mil- 
ton, e.g., he says that if he had only been born in France 
in the reign of Louis XIV., and had " combined with 
the native grandeur of his genius the taste of Racine and 
Boileau," the " Paradise Lost " might have equalled the 
"Iliad." 

Chateaubriand never called himself a romantic. It is 
agreed upon all hands that the expressions romantisme 
and Utteratiire romajitique were first invented or imported 
by Madame de Stael in her "L'Allemagne" (1813), 
"pour exprimer I'affranchissement des vieilles formes 
litteraires." f Some ten years later, or by 1823, when 
Stendhal published his" Racine et Shakspere," the issue 
between the schools had been joined and the question 

*For Chateaubriand and Ossian see vol. i., pp. 332-33. He 
made translations from Ossian, Gray, and Milton, 
f "Victor Hugo," par Paul Boudois, p. 32. 



The l^pmantic (Movement in France. 209 

quite thoroughly agitated in the Parisian journals. 
Stendhal announced himself as an adherent of the new, 
but his temper was decidedly cool and unromantic. I 
have quoted his epigrammatic definition of romanticism.* 

In this brochure Stendhal announces that France is on 
the eve of a literary revolution and that the last hour of 
classicism has struck, although as yet the classicists are 
in possession of the theatres, and of all the salaried lit- 
erary positions under government; and all the newspapers 
of all shades of political opinion are shut to the roman- 
ticists. A company of English actors who attempted to 
give some of Shakspere's plays at the Porte-Saint-Martin 
in 1822 were mobbed. "The hisses and cat-calls began 
before the performance, of which it was impossible to 
hear a single word. As soon as the actors appeared they 
were pelted with apples and eggs, and from time to time 
the audience called out to them to talk French, and 
shouted, ''A has Shakspere ! c'est im aide de camp du 
due de WeHington.' " It will be remembered that in our 
own day the first representations of Wagner's operas at 
Paris were interrupted with similar cries: "Pas de 
Wagner /" " A has les Allemands /" etc. 

In 1827 Kemble's company visited Paris and gave, in 
English, " Hamlet," " Romeo and Juliet," " Othello," and 
"The Merchant of Venice." Dumas went to see them 
and described the impression made upon him by Shak- 
spere, in language identical with that which Goethe used 
about himself. f He was like a man born blind and sud- 
denly restored to sight. Dumas' " Henry III." (1829), 
a drame in the manner of Shakspere's historical plays, 

*Vol. 1., p. 10. 

f See vol. i. , p. 379. 



2 lo <i/J History of English Romanticism. 

though in prose, was the immediate result of this new 
vision. English actors were in Paris again in 1828 and 
1829; and in 1835 Macready presented "Hamlet," 
"Othello," and "Henry IV," with great success. Pre- 
vious to these performances, the only opportunities that 
the French public had to judge of Shakspere's dramas as 
acting plays were afforded by the wretched adaptations 
of Ducis and other stage carpenters. Ducis had read 
Shakspere only in Letourneur's very inadequate transla- 
tion (revised by Guizot in 182 1). His "Hamlet" was 
played in 1769; "Macbeth," 1784; " King John," 1791; 
"Othello" (turned into a comedy), 1792. Mercier's 
" Timon " was given in 1 794 ; and Dejaure's " Imogenes " 
— an "arrangement" of "Cymbeline" — in 1796. The 
romanticists labored to put their countrymen in posses- 
sion of better versions of Shakspere. Alfred de Vigny 
rendered " Othello " (1827), and Emile Deschamps, " Ro- 
meo and Juliet" and "Macbeth." 

Stendhal interviewed a director of one of the French 
theatres and tried to persuade him that there would be 
money in it for any house which would have the courage 
to give a season of romantic tragedy. But the director, 
who seemed to be a liberal-minded man, assured him that 
until some stage manager could be found rich enough to 
buy up the dramatic criticism of the Cotistitutionnel and 
two or three other newspapers, the law students and med- 
ical students, who were under the influence of those jour- 
nals, would never suffer the play to get as far as the third 
act. "If it were otherwise," he said, "don't you suppose 
that we would have tried Schiller's 'William Tell'? The 
police would have cut out a quarter of it; one of our 
adapters another quarter ; and what was left would reach 



The l^manttc {Movemejit in France. 211 

a hundred representations, provided it could once secure 
three." 

To this the author replied that the immense majority 
of young society people had been converted to romanti- 
cism by the eloquence of M. Cousin. 

" Sir," said the director, '' your young society people 
don't go into the parterre to engage in fisticuffs [Jaire le 
coup de poing], and at the theatre, as in politics, we de- 
spise philosophers who don't fight." Stendhal adds that 
the editors of influential journals found their interest 
in this state of things, since many of them had pieces of 
their own on the stage, written of course in alexandrine 
verse and on the classic model ; and what would become 
of these masterpieces if Talma should ever get permission 
to play in a prose translation of " Macbeth," abridged, 
say, one-third? "I said one day to one of these gentle- 
men, 28,000,000 men, i.e., 18,000,000 in England and 
10,000,000 in America, admire ' Macbeth ' and applaud it 
a hundred times a year. ' The English,' he answered me 
with great coolness, ' cannot have real eloquence or poetry 
truly admirable; the nature of their language, which is 
not derived from the Latin, makes it quite impossible.'" 
A great part of " Racine et Shakspere " is occupied with 
a refutation of the doctrine of the unities of time and 
place, and with a discussion of the real nature of dra- 
matic illusion, on which their necessity was supposed to 
rest. Stendhal maintains that the illusion is really 
stronger in Shakspere's tragedies than in Racine's. It 
is not essential here to reproduce his argument, which is 
the same that is familiar to us in Lessing and in Cole- 
ridge, though he was an able controversialist, and his logic 
and irony give a freshness to the treatment of this hack- 



212 z/l History of English ^Romanticism. 

neyed theme which makes his little treatise well worth 
the reading. To illustrate the nature of real stzge illu- 
sion, he says that last year (August, 1822) a soldier in a 
Baltimore theatre, seeing Othello about to kill Desde- 
mona, cried out, "It shall never be said that a damned 
nigger killed a white woman in my presence," and at the 
same moment fired his gun and broke an arm of the actor 
who was playing Othello. ^^ £A dien, this soldier had 
ilhision : he believed that the action which was passing 
on the stage was true." 

Stendhal proposes the following as a definition of ro- 
mantic tragedy : " It is written in prose ; the succession 
of events which it presents to the eyes of the spectators 
lasts several months, and they happen in different places." 
He complains that the French comedies are not funny, 
do not make any one laugh; and that the French tragic 
dialogue is epic rather than dramatic. He advises his 
readers to go and see Kean in " Richard " and " Othello " ; 
and says that since reading Schlegel and Dennis (!) 
he has a great contempt for the French critics. He ap- 
peals to the usages of the German and English stage in 
disregarding the rules of Aristotle, and cites the great 
popularity of Walter Scott's romances, which, he says, 
are nothing more than romantic tragedies with long de- 
scriptions interspersed, to support his plea for a new 
kind of French prose-tragedy; for which he recommends 
subjects taken from national history, and especially from 
the mediseval chroniclers like Froissart. Nevertheless, 
he does not advise the direct imitation of Shakspere. 
He blames Schiller for copying Shakspere, and eulogizes 
Werner's " Luther " as nearer to the masterpieces of 
Shakspere than Schiller's tragedies are. He wants the 



The l^mantu (Movement in France. 213 

new French drama to resemble Shakspere only in dealing 
freely with modern conditions, as the latter did with the 
conditions of his time, without having the fear of Racine 
or any other authority before its eyes. 

In 1824 the Academy, which was slowly constructing 
its famous dictionary of the French language, happened 
to arrive at the new word romanticism which needed defin- 
ing. This was the signal for a heated debate in that ven- 
erable body, and the director, M. Auger, was commis- 
sioned to prepare a manifesto against the new literary 
sect, to be read at the meeting of the Institute on the 
24th of April next. It was in response to this manifesto 
that Stendhal wrote the second part of his " Racine et 
Shakspere" (1825), attached to which is a short essay en- 
titled " Qu'est ce que le Romanticisme ? " * addressed to the 
Italian public, and intended to explain to them the literary 
situation in France, and to enlist their sympathies on the 
romantic side. " Shakspere," he says, " the hero of roman- 
tic poetry, as opposed to Racine, the god of the classicists, 
wrote for strong souls ; for English hearts which were what 
Italian hearts were about 1500, emerging from that sub- 
lime Middle Age qiiesti tempi delta virtu sco?iosciutta.'^ 
Racine, on the contrary, wrote for a slavish and effem- 
inate court. The author disclaims any wish to impose 
Shakspere on the Italians. The day will come, he hopes, 
when they will have a national tragedy of their own ; but 
to have that, they will do better to follow in the footprints 
of Shakspere than, like Alfieri, in the footprints of Ra- 
cine. In spite of the pedants, he predicts that Germany 
and England will carry it over France; Shakspere, Schil- 

* The use of this form instead of rotnantisme is perhaps 
worth noticing. 



214 <v^ History of English l^manficism. 

ler, and Lord Byron will carry it over Racine and Boileau. 
He says that English poetry since the French Revolution 
has become more enthusiastic, more serious, more pas- 
sionate. It needed other subjects than those required by 
the witty and frivolous eighteenth century, and sought 
its heroes in the rude, primitive, inventive ages, or even 
among savages and barbarians. It had to have recourse 
to time or countries when it was permitted to the higher 
classes of society to have passions. The Greek and Latin 
classics could give no help; since most of them belonged 
to an epoch as artificial, and as far removed from the 
naive presentation of the passions, as the eighteenth cen- 
tury itself. The court of Augustus was no more natural 
than that of Louis XIV. Accordingly the most suc- 
cessful poets in England, during the past twenty years, 
have not only sought deeper emotions than those of the 
eighteenth century, but have treated subjects which would 
have been scornfully rejected by the age of bel esprit. 
The anti-romantics can't cheat us much longer. *' Where, 
among the works of our Italian pedants, are the books 
that go through seven editions in two months, like the 
romantic poems that are coming out in London at the 
present moment? Compare, e.g., the success of Moore's 
*Lalla Rookh,' which appeared in June, 1817, and the 
eleventh edition of which I have before me, with the suc- 
cess of the ' Camille ' of the highly classical Mr. Botta ! ' " 
In 1822, a year before the appearance of Stendhal's 
" Racine et Shakspere," Victor Hugo had published his 
"Odes et Poesies Diverses," and a second collection fol- 
lowed in 1824. In the prefaces to these two volumes he 
protests against the use of the terms classic and romantic, 
as mots de guerre and vague words which every one defines 



The l^omaniic ^Movement in France. 215 

in accordance with his own prejudices. If romanticism 
means anything, he says, it means the literature of the 
nineteenth century; and all the anathemas launched at 
the heads of contemporary writers reduce themselves to 
the following method of argument. "We condemn the 
literature of the nineteenth century because it is roman- 
tic. And why is it romantic? Because it is the litera- 
ture of the nineteenth century." As to the false taste 
which disfigured the eighteenth-century imitations of 
Racine and Boileau, he would prefer to distinguish that 
by the name scholastic, a style which is to the truly 
classic what superstition and fanaticism are to religion. 
The intention of these youthful poems of Hugo was partly 
literary and partly political and religious : " The history 
of mankind affords no poetry," he says, " except when 
judged from the vantage-ground of monarchical ideas 
and religious beliefs. . . . He has thought that ... in 
substituting for the outworn and false colours of pagan 
mythology the new and truthful colours of the Christian 
theogony, one could inject into the ode something of the 
interest of the drama, and could make it speak, besides, 
that austere, consoling, and religious language which is 
needed by an old society that issues still trembling from 
the saturnalia of atheism and anarchy. . . . The litera- 
ture of the present, the actual literature, is the expression, 
by way of anticipation, of that religious and monarchical 
society which will issue, doubtless, from the midst of so 
many ancient debris, of so many recent ruins. ... If 
the literature of the great age of Louis XIV. had invoked 
Christianity in place of worshipping heathen gods . . . 
the triumph of the sophistical doctrines of the last cen- 
tury would have been much more difficult, perhaps even 



2i6 z/J History of English l^omanticism. 

impossible. . . . But France had not that good fortune ; 
its national poets were almost all pagan poets; and our 
literature was rather the expression of an idolatrous and 
democratic, than of a monarchical and Christian society." 
The prevailing note, accordingly, in these early odes is 
that of the Bourbon Restoration of 1815-30, and of the 
Catholic reaction against the sceptical ^daircissemetit of 
the eighteenth century. The subjects are such as these : 
" The Poet in the Times of Revolution " ; " La Vendue " ; 
"The Maidens of Verdun," which chants the martyrdom 
of three young royalist sisters who were put to death for 
sending money and supplies to the emigrds ; " Quibiron," 
where a royalist detachment which had capitulated under 
promise of being treated like prisoners of war, were shot 
down in squads by the Convention soldiery; "Louis 
XVII."; "The Replacement of the Statue of Henry 
IV." ; " The Death of the Duke of Berry " ; " The Birth 
of the Duke of Bourdeaux " and his " Baptism " ; " The 
Funeral of Louis XVIII." ; " The Consecration of Charles 
X."; "The Death of Mile, de Sombreuil," the royalist 
heroine who saved her father's life by drinking a cupful 
of human blood in the days of the Terror; and "La 
Bande Noire," which denounces with great bitterness the 
violation of the tombs of the kings of France by the 
regicides, and pleads for the preservation of the ruins of 
feudal times: 

"O murs ! 6 creneaux ! 6 tourelles ! 
Remparts, fosses aux ponts mouvants ! 
Lourds faisceaux de colonnes freles ! 
Fiers chateaux ! modestes couvents ! 
Cloitres poudreux, salles antiques, 
Ou gemissaient les saints cantiques, 
Ou riaient les banquets joyeux ! 
Lieux ou le cceur met ses chimeres ! 



The l^pmatittc {Movement in France. 2 1 7 

feglises ou priaient nos meres 
Tours ou combattaient nos aieux ! " 

In these two ode collections, though the Catholic and 
legitimist inspiration is everywhere apparent, there is 
nothing revolutionary in the language or verse forms. 
But in the "Odes et Ballades" of 1826, "the romantic 
challenge," says Saintsbury, " is definitely thrown down. 
The subjects are taken by preference from times and 
countries which the classical tradition had regarded as 
barbarous. The metres and rhythm are studioiisly 
broken, varied, and irregular; the language has the ut- 
most possible glow of colour, as opposed to the cold cor- 
rectness of classical poetry, the completest disdain of 
conventional periphrasis, the boldest reliance on exotic 
terms and daring neologisms." This description applies 
more particularly to the Ballades, many of which, such 
as " La Ronde du Sabbat," " La Le'gende de la Nonne," 
" La Chasse du Burgrave," and " Le Pas d'Armes du Roi 
Jean " are mediaeval studies in which the lawless grotes- 
querie of Gothic art runs riot. " The author, in compos- 
ing them," says the preface, " has tried to give some idea 
of what the poems of the first troubadours of the Middle 
Ages might have been ; those Christian rhapsodists who 
had nothing in the world but their swords and their gui- 
tars, and went from castle to castle paying for their en- 
tertainment with their songs," To show that liberty in 
art does not mean disorder, the author draws an elaborate 
contrast between the garden of Versailles and a primitive 
forest, in a passage which will remind the reader of sim- 
ilar comparisons in the writings of Shenstone, Walpole, 
and other English romanticists of the eighteenth century. 
There is as much order, he asserts, in the forest as in the 



2i8 t/^ History of English T^omanticism. 

garden, but it is a live order, not a dead regularity. 
" Choose then," he exclaims, " between the masterpiece 
of gardening and the work of nature; between that which 
is beautiful by convention and that which is beautiful 
without rule; between an artificial literature and an orig- 
inal poetry. ... In two words — and we shall not object 
to have judgment passed in accordance with this observa- 
tion on the two kinds of literature that are called classic 
and romantic, — regularity is the taste of mediocrity, order 
is the taste of genius. ... It will be objected to us that 
the virgin forest hides in its magnificent solitudes a thou- 
sand dangerous animals, while the marshy basins of the 
French garden conceal at most a few harmless creatures. 
That is doubtless a misfortune; but, taking it all in all, 
we like a crocodile better than a frog; we prefer a bar- 
barism of Shakspere to an insipidity of Campistron." 
But above all things — such is the doctrine of this preface 
— do not imitate anybody — not Shakspere any more than 
Racine. " He who imitates a romantic poet becomes 
thereby a classic, and just because he imitates." In 1823 
Hugo had published anonymously his first prose romance, 
" Han d'Islande," the story of a Norwegian bandit. He 
got up the local colour for this by a careful study of the 
Edda and the Sagas, that " poesie sauvage " which was 
the admiration of the new school and the horror of the 
old. But it was in the preface to "Cromwell," published 
in 1827, that Hugo issued the full and, as it were, offi- 
cial manifesto of romanticism. The play itself is hardly 
actable. It is modelled, in a sense, upon the historical 
plays of Shakspere, but its Cromwell is a very melodra- 
matic person, and its Puritans and Cavaliers strike the 
English reader with the same sense of absurdity produced 



The '^mantic ^Movement in France. 219 

by the pictures of English society in "L'Homme qui 
Rit." But of the famous preface Gautier says: "The 
Bible among Protestants, the Koran among Mahometans 
are not the object of a deeper veneration. It was, in- 
deed, for us the book of books, the book which contained 
the pure dofctrine." It consisted in great part of a tri- 
umphant attack upon the unities, and upon the verse and 
style which classic usage had consecrated to French trag- 
edy. I need not repeat the argument here. It is already 
familiar, and some sentences * from this portion of the 
essay I have quoted elsewhere. 

The preface also contained a plea for another peculiar- 
ity of the romantic drama, its mixture, viz., of tragedy 
and comedy. According to Hugo, this is the character- 
istic trait, the fundamental difference, which separates 
modern from ancient art, romantic from classical litera- 
ture. Antique art, he says, rejected everything which 
was not purely beautiful, but the Christian and modern 
spirit feels that there are many things in creation besides 
that which is, humanly speaking, beautiful ; and that 
everything which is in nature is — or has the right to be 
— in art. It includes in its picture of life the ugly, the 
misshapen, the monstrous. Hence results a new type, 
the grotesque, and a new literary form, romantic comedy. 
He proceeds to illustrate this thesis with his usual wealth 
of imaginative detail and pictorial language. The Mid- 
dle Ages, more than any other period, are rich in in- 
stances of that intimate blending of the comic and the 
horrible which we call the grotesque; the witches' Sab- 
bath, the hoofed and horned devil, the hideous figures of 
Dante's hell; the Scaramouches, Crispins, Harlequins 
*See vol. i., pp. 19-20. 



2 20 <iA History of English ^Romanticism. 

of Italian farce; "grimacing silhouettes of man, quite 
unknown to grave antiquity "; and " all those local drag- 
ons of our legends, the gargoyle of Rouen, the Taras of 
Tarascon, etc. . . . The contact of deformity has given 
to the modern sublime something purer, grander, more 
sublime, in short, than the antique beauty. ... Is it not 
because the modern imagination knows how to set prowl- 
ing hideously about our churchyards, the vampires, the 
ogres, the erl-kings, the psylles, the ghouls, the brucolaques, 
the aspioles, that it is able to give its fays that bodiless 
form, that purity of essence which the pagan nymphs ap- 
proach so little? The antique Venus is beautiful, admir- 
able, no doubt; but what has spread over the figures of 
Jean Goujon that graceful, strange, airy elegance? What 
has given them that unfamiliar character of life and 
grandeur, unless it be the neighbourhood of the rude and 
strong carvings of the Middle Ages? . . . The grotesque 
imprints its character especially upon that wonderful 
architecture which in the Middle Ages takes the place of 
all the arts. It attaches its marks to the fronts of the 
cathedrals; enframes its hells and purgatories under the 
portal arches, and sets them aflame upon the windows; 
unrolls its monsters, dogs, demons around the capitals, 
along the friezes, on the eaves." We find this same bi- 
zarre note in the mediaeval laws, social usages, church 
institutions, and popular legends, in the court fools, in 
the heraldic emblems, the religious processions, the story 
of " Beauty and the Beast." It explains the origin of the 
Shaksperian drama, the high-water mark of modern art. 

Shakspere does not seem to me an artist of the gro- 
tesque. He is by turns the greatest of tragic and the 
greatest of comic artists, and his tragedy and comedy lie 



The 'T^mantic ^Movement in France. 221 

close together, as in life, but without that union of the 
terrible and the ludicrous in the same figure, and that 
element of deformity which is the essence of the proper 
grotesque. He has created, however, one specimen of 
true grotesque, the monster Caliban. Caliban is a comic 
figure, but not purely comic; there is something savage, 
uncouth, and frightful about him. He has the dignity 
and the poetry which all rude, primitive beings have: 
which the things of nature, rocks and trees and wild 
beasts have. It is significant, therefore, that Robert 
Browning should have been attracted to Caliban. Brown- 
ing had little comic power, little real humour; in him the 
grotesque is an imperfect form of the comic. The same 
criticism applies to Hugo. He gave a capital example 
of the grotesque in the four fools in the third act of 
" Cromwell " and in Triboulet, the Shaksperian jester of 
"Le Roi s'Amuse." Their songs and dialogues are bi- 
zarre and fantastic in the highest degree, but they are 
not funny; they do not make us laugh like the clowns 
of Shakspere — they are not comic, but merely queer. 
Hugo's defective sense of humour is shown in the way 
in which he frequently takes that one step which, Napo- 
leon said, separates the sublime from the ridiculous — 
exaggerating character and motive till the heroic passes 
into melodrama and melodrama into absurdity. This 
fault is felt in his great prose romance " Notre-Dame de 
Paris" (183 1), a picture of mediaeval Paris, in which the 
humpback Quasimodo affords an exact illustration or 
what the author meant by the grotesque; another of the 
same kind is furnished by the hero of his liter romance 
"L'Homme qui Rit." 

Gautier has left a number of sketches, wri'-en in a vein 



2 22 <iA History of English '^Romanticism. 

lovingly humorous, of some of the eccentrics — the curi- 
osit'es romantiques — whose oddities are perhaps even more 
instructive as to the many directions which the movement 
took, than the more ordered enthusiasm of the less ex- 
treme votaries. There was the architect Jule Vabre, e.g.^ 
whose specialty was Shakspere. Shakspere " was his 
god, his idol, his passion, a wonder to which he could 
never grow accustomed." Vabre's life-project was a 
French translation of his idol, which should be absolutely 
true to the text, reproducing the exact turn and move- 
ment of the phrase, following the alternations of prose, 
rime, and blank verse in the original, and shunning 
neither its euphemistic subtleties nor its barbaric rough- 
nesses. To fit himself for this task, he went to London 
and lived there, striving to submit himself to the atmos- 
phere and the milieu, and learning to think in English; 
and there Gautier encountered him about 1843, in a tav- 
ern at High-Holborn, drinking stout and eating rosbij 
and speaking French with an English accent. Gautier 
told him that all he had to do now, to translate Shak- 
spere, was to learn French. "I am going to work at it," 
he answered, more struck with the wisdom than the wit 
of the suggestion. A few years later Vabre turned up in 
France with a project for a sort of international seminary. 
" He wanted to explain ' Hernani ' to the English and 
' Macbeth ' to the French. It made him tired to see the 
English learning French in ' Telemaque,' and the French 
learning English in the ' Vicar of Wakefield.' " Poor 
Vabre's great Shakspere translation never materialised; 
but Frangois-Victor Hugo, the second son of the great 
romancer, carried out many of Vabre's principles of trans- 
lation in his version of Shakspere. 



The 'T^pmantic [Movement in France. 223 

Another curious figure was the water-colour painter, 
Celestin Nanteuil, who suggested to Gautier the hero of 
an early piece of his own, written to accompany an en- 
graving in an English keepsake, representing the Square 
of St. Sebald at Nuremberg. This hero, Elias Wildman- 
stadius, or I'Homme Moyen-age, was " in a sort, the 
Gothic genius of that Gothic town " — a retardataire or 
man born out of his own time — who should have been 
born in 1460, in the days of Albrecht Diirer. Celestin 
Nanteuil " had the air of one of those tall angels carry- 
ing a censer or playing on the sambucque, who inhabit 
the gable ends of cathedrals; and he seemed to have 
come down into the city among the busy townsfolk, still 
wearing his nimbus plate behind his head in place of a 
hat, and without having the least suspicion that it is not 
perfectly natural to wear one's aureole in the street." 
He is described as resembling in figure "the spindling 
columns of the church naves of the fifteenth century. . . . 
The azure of the frescoes of Fiesole had furnished the 
blue of his eyes; his hairs, of the blond of an aureole, 
seemed painted one by one, with the gold of the illumi- 
nators of the Middle Ages. . . . One would have said, 
that from the height of his Gothic pinnacle Celestin 
Nanteuil overlooked the actual town, hovering above the 
sea of roofs, regarding the eddying blue smoke, perceiving 
the city squares like a checkerboard, the streets like the 
notches of a saw in a stone bench, the passers-by like 
mice; but all that confusedly athwart the haze, while 
from his airy observatory he saw, close at hand and in all 
their detail, the rose windows, the bell towers bristling 
with crosses, the kings, patriarchs, prophets, saints, angels 
of all the orders, the whole monstrous army of demons 



224 £^ History of English ^Romanticism. 

or chimeras, nailed, scaled, tushed, hideously winged; 
guivres^ taresques, gargoyles, asses' heads, apes' muzzles, 
all the strange bestiary of the Middle Age." Nanteuil 
furnished illustrations for the books of the French ro- 
manticists. " Hugo's * Notre-Dame de Paris ' was the 
object of his most fervent admiration, and he drew from 
it subjects for a large number of designs and aquarelles." 
Gautier mentions, as among his rarest vignettes, the 
frontispiece of " Albertus," recalling Rembrandt's man- 
ner; and his view of the Palazzo of San Marc in Royer's 
"Venezia la bella." Gautier says that one might apply 
to Nanteuil's aquarelles what Joseph Delorme* said of 
Hugo's ballads, that they were Gothic window paintings. 
" The essential thing in these short fantasies is the car- 
riage, the shape, the clerical, monastic, royal, seignorial 
<zw>^z£/ar^/z^j-i' of the figures and their high colouring. . . . 
Celestin had made his own the angular anatomy of coats- 
of-arms, the extravagant contours of the mantles, the chi- 
merical or monstrous figures of heraldry, the branchings 
of the emblazoned skirts, the lofty attitude of the feudal 
baron, the modest air of the chatelaine, the sanctimonious 
physiognomy of the big Carthusian Carmelite, the furtive 
mien of the young page with parti-coloured pantaloons. 
. . . He excelled also in setting the persons of poem, 
drama, or romance in ornamented frames like the Gothic 
shrines with triple colonettes, arches, canopied and 
bracketed niches, with statuettes, figurines, emblematic 
animals, male and female saints on a background of gold. 
He entered so deeply into the sentiment of the old Gothic 
imagery that he could make a Lady of the Pillar in a 
brocade dalmatica, a Mater Dolorosa with the seven 
*Sainte-Beuve's "Confessions de Joseph Delorme," 1829. 



The l^omanttc (Movement in France. 225 

swords in her breast, a St. Christopher with the child 
Jesus on his shoulder and leaning on a palm tree, worthy 
to serve as types to the Byzantine painters of Epinal. . . . 
Nothing resembled less the clock face and troubadour 
Middle Age which flourished about 1825. It is one of 
the main services of the romantic school to have thor- 
oughly disembarrassed art from this." Gautier describes 
also a manuscript piece of Nerval, for which he furnished 
a prologue, and which was an imitation of one of the 
Diableries^ or popular farces of the Middle Ages, in which 
the devil was introduced. It contained a piece within 
the piece, in the fashion of an old mystery play, with 
scenery consisting of the mouth of hell, painted red and 
surmounted by a blue paradise starred with gold. An 
angel came down to play at dice with the devil for souls. 
In his excess of zeal, the angel cheated and the devil 
grew angry and called him a "big booby, a celestial 
fowl," and threatened to pull his feathers out ("Le Prince 
des Sots"). 

In France, as in England and Germany, the romantic 
revival promoted and accompanied works of erudition like 
Raynouard's researches in Provengal and old French 
philology and the poetry of the troubadours (1816); 
Creuze de Lesser's " Chevaliers de la Table Ronde " ; 
Marchangy's *' La Gaule Poetique." History took new 
impulse from that sens dii passe ^\\ic\i romanticism did so 
much to awaken. Augustin Thierry's obligations to Scott 
have already been noticed. It was the war chant of the 
Prankish warriors in Chateaubriand's " Les Martyrs " — 

" Pharamond ! Pharamond ! nous avons combattu avec 
r6pee " — 

which first excited his historical imagination and started 



2 26 ft/^ History of English %omanticism. 

him upon the studies which issued in the " Rdcits Mero- 
vingiens " and the " Conquete d'Angleterre." Barante's 
"Dues de Bourgogne" (1814-28) confessedly owes much 
of its inception to Scott. Michaud's " History of the 
Crusades" (181 1-22) and the "History of France" 
(1833-67) by that most romantic of historians, Michelet, 
may also be credited to the romantic movement. The 
end of the movement, as a definite period in the history 
of French literature, is commonly dated from the failure 
upon the stage of Victor Hugo's " Les Burgraves " in 
1843. The immediate influence of the French romantic 
school upon English poetry or prose was slight. Like 
the German school, it came too late. The first genera- 
tion of English romantics was drawing to its close. Scott 
died two years after " Hernani " stormed the French the- 
atre. Two years later still died Coleridge, long since 
fallen silent — as a poet — and always deaf to Gallic 
charming. We shall find the first impress of French 
romance among younger men and in the latter half cen- 
tury. 

In France itself the movement passed on into other 
phases. Many early adherents of Hugo's cenacle and 
entourage fell away from their allegiance and, like Sainte- 
Beuve and Musset, took up a critical or even antagonis- 
tic attitude. Musset's " Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet " * 
turns the whole romantic contention into mockery. Yet 
no work more fantastically and gracefully romantic, more 
Shaksperian in quality, was produced by any member of 
the school than Musset produced in such dramas as 
" Fantasio " and " Lorenzaccio." 

*See vol. i., pp. 18-23. 



CHAPTER VI. 

DiflfuseD IRomanticism In tbc Xitcrature ot tbe mine* 
tecntb Centurg. 

Most of the poetry of the century that has just closed 
has been romantic in the wider or looser acceptation of 
the term. N Emotional stress, sensitiveness to the pictur- 
esque, love of natural scenery, interest in distant times 
and places, curiosity of the wonderful and mysterious, 
subjectivity, lyricism, intrusion of the ego, impatience of 
the limits of the genres, eager experiment with new forms 
of art — these and the like marks of the romantic spirit are 
as common in the verse literature of the nineteenth cen- 
tury as they are rare in that of the eighteenth. The same 
is true of imaginative prose, particularly during the first 
half of the century, the late Georgian and early Victorian 
period. In contrast with Addison, Swift, and Goldsmith, 
De Quincey, Carlyle, and Ruskin are romanticists. In 
contrast with Hume, Macaulay is romantic, concrete, pic- 
torial. The critical work of Hazlitt and Lamb was in 
line with Coleridge's, They praised the pre-Augustan 
writers, the Elizabethan dramatists, the seventeenth-cen- 
tury humorists and moralists, the Sidneian amourists 
and fanciful sonneteers, at the expense of their classical 
successors. 

But in the narrower sense of the word — the sense which 
controls in these inquiries — the great romantic generation 



2 28 c// History of English ^{omanticism. 

ended virtually with the death of Scott in 1832. Cole- 
ridge followed in 1834, Wordsworth in 1850. Both had 
long since ceased to contribute anything of value to im- 
aginative literature. Byron, Shelley, and Keats had died 
some years before Coleridge ; Leigh Hunt survived until 
1859. The mediaevalism of Coleridge, Scott, and Keats 
lived on in dispersed fashion till it condensed itself a 
second time, and with redoubled intensity, in the work 
of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which belongs to the 
last half of the century. The direct line of descent was 
from Keats to Rossetti ; and the Pre-Raphaelites bear 
very much such a relation to the elder group, as the ro- 
mantic school proper in Germany bears to Burger and 
Herder, and to Goethe and Schiller in their younger 
days. That is to say, their mediaevalism was more con- 
centrated, more exclusive, and more final. 

We have come to a point in the chronology of our sub- 
ject where the material is so abundant that we must nar- 
row the field of study to creative work, and to work which 
is romantic in the strictest meaning. Henceforth we 
may leave out of account all works of mere erudition as 
such; all those helps which the scholarship of the cen- 
tury has furnished to a knowledge of the Middle Ages: 
histories, collections, translations, reprints of old texts, 
critical editions, Middle English lexicons and grammars, 
studies of special subjects, such as popular myths or 
miracle plays or the Arthurian legends, and the like. 
Numerous and valuable as these publications have been, 
they concern us only indirectly. They have swelled the 
material available for the student; they have not neces- 
sarily stimulated the imagination of the poet; which 
sometimes — as in the case of Chatterton and of Keats — 



THffused l^omanticism in the (N^ineteenth Century. 229 

goes off at a touch and carries but a light charge of 
learning. In literary history it is the beginnings that 
count. Child's great ballad collection is, beyond com- 
parison, more important from the scholar's point of view 
than Percy's "Reliques." But in the history of roman- 
ticism it is of less importance, because it came a century 
later. Mallet's " Histoire de Dannemarc " has been long 
since superseded, and the means now accessible in Eng- 
lish for a study of Norse mythology are infinitely greater 
than when Gray read and Percy translated the " North- 
ern Antiquities." But it is not the history of the revival 
of the knowledge of mediaeval life that we are following 
here; it is rather the history of that part of our modern 
creative literature which has been kindled by contact — 
perhaps a very slight and casual contact — with the trans- 
mitted image of mediaeval life. 

Nor need we concern ourselves further with literary 
criticism or the history of opinion. This was worth 
considering in the infancy of the movement, when War- 
ton began to question the supremacy of Pope; when 
Hurd asserted the fitness for the poet's uses of the Gothic 
fictions and the institution of chivalry; and when Percy 
ventured to hope that cultivated readers would find some- 
thing deserving attention in old English minstrelsy. It 
was still worth considering a half-century later, when 
Coleridge explained away the dramatic unities, and 
Byron once more took up the lost cause of Pope. But 
by 1832 the literary revolution was complete. Romance 
was in no further need of vindication, when all Scott's 
library of prose and verse stood back of her, and 

" High-piled books in charactery 
Held, like rich garners, the full-ripened grain." 



230 i^ History of English %omanticism. 

As to Scott's best invention, the historical romance, I 
shall not pursue its fortunes to the end. The formula 
once constituted, its application was easy, whether the 
period chosen was the Middle Ages or any old period 
B.C. or A.D. Here and there an individual stands forth 
from the class, either for its excellent conformity with 
the Waverley type or for its originality in deviation. Of 
the former kind is Charles Reade's " The Cloister and 
the Hearth" (1861); and of the latter Mr. Maurice 
Hewlett's '' The Forest Lovers" (1898). The title page 
of Reade's novel describes the book as " a matter-of-fact 
romance." It is as well documented as any of Scott's, 
and reposes especially upon the " Colloquies " of Eras- 
mus, the betrothal of whose parents, with their subse- 
quent separation by the monastic vow of celibacy, is the 
subject of the story. This is somewhat romanticised, 
but keeps a firm grip upon historical realities. The 
period of the action is the fifteenth century, yet the work 
is as far as possible from being a chivalry tale, like the 
diaphanous fictions of Fouque. " In that rude age," 
writes the novelist, " body prevailing over mind, all sen- 
timents took material forms. Man repented with scourges, 
prayed by bead, bribed the saints with wax tapers, put 
fish into the body to sanctify the soul, sojourned in cold 
water for empire over the emotions, and thanked God for 
returning health in i cwt., 2 stone, 7 lbs., 3 oz., i dwt. 
of bread and cheese." There is no lack in " The Clois- 
ter and the Hearth " of stirring incident and bold adven- 
ture; encounters with bears and with bandits, sieges, 
witch trials, gallows hung with thieves, archery with long 
bow and arbalest — everywhere fighting enough, as in 
Scott; and, also as in Scott, behind the private drama of 



IDiffused 'Romanticism in the V^ineteenth Century. 23 1 

true love, intrigue, persecution, the broad picture of so- 
ciety. It is no idealised version of the Middle Ages. 
The ugly, sordid side of mediaeval life is turned outwards; 
its dirt, discomfort, ignorance, absurdity, brutality, un- 
reason and insecurity are rendered with crass realism. 
The burgher is more in evidence than the chevalier. 
Less after the manner of the Waverley novels, and more 
after that of " Hypatia," " Romola," and " Fathers and 
Sons," it depicts the intellectual unrest of the time, the 
conflicting ideals of the old and new generations. The 
printing-press is being set up, and the hero finds his art 
of calligraphy, learned in the scriptorium, no longer in 
request. The Pope and many of the higher clergy are 
infected with the religious scepticism and humanitarian 
enthusiasm of the Renaissance. The child Erasmus is 
the new birth of reason, destined to make war on monkery 
and superstition and thereby avenge his parents' wrongs. 
Of quite another fashion of mediaevalism is Mr. Hewlett's 
story — sheer romance. The wonderful wood of Mor- 
graunt, with its charcoal burners and wayside shrines, 
black meres frowned over by skeleton castles, and gentle 
hinds milked by the heroine to get food for her wounded 
lover, is of no time or country, but almost as unreal as 
Spenser's fairy forest. Through its wild ways Isoult la 
Desirous and Prosper le Gai go adventuring like Una 
and her Red Cross knight, or Enid and Geraint. Or, 
again, Isoult in her page's dress, and forsaken by her 
wedded lord, is like Viola or Imogen or Rosalind, or 
Constance in " Marmion," or any lady of old romance. 
Or sometimes again she is like a wood spirit, or an ele- 
mental creature such as was Undine. The invented 
place names. High March, Wanmeeting, Market Basing, 



232 <iA History of English '^Romanticism. 

etc.j with their transparent air of actuality, sound an echo 
from William Morris' prose romances, like "The House 
of theWolfings" and "The Sundering Flood." As in 
the las. named, and in Thomas Hardy's " Return of the 
Native," the reader's imagination is assisted by a map of 
the Morgraunt forest and the river Wan. Mr. Hewlett 
has evidently profited, too, by recent romances of various 
schools: by " Prince Otto," ^.^., and "The Prisoner of 
Zenda," and possibly by others. His Middle Ages are 
not the Middle Ages of history, but of poetic convention ; 
a world where anything may happen and where the facts 
of any precise social state are attenuated into " atmos- 
phere " for the use of the imagination. " The Forest 
Lovers " is nearer to " Christabel " or " La Belle Dame 
sans Merci " than to " Ivanhoe " : is, indeed, a prose poem, 
though not quite an allegory like " Sintram and his 
Companions." 

Among Scott's contemporaries, Byron and Shelley, 
profoundly romantic in temper, were not retrospective in 
their habit of mind; and the Middle Ages, in particular, 
had little to say to them. Scott stood for the past; Byron 
— a man of his time, a modern man — for the present; 
Shelley — a visionary, with a system of philosophical per- 
fectionism — for the future. Memory, Mnemosyne, mother 
of the muses, was the nurse of Scott's genius. Byron 
lived intensely in the world which he affected to despise. 
Shelley prophesied, with eyes fixed upon the coming age. 
We have found, in Byron's contributions to the Pope 
controversy, one expression of his instinctive sympathy 
with the classical and contempt for the Gothic. Shelley, 
too, was a Hellenist; and to both, in their angry break 
with authority and their worship of liberty, the naked 



T)iffused l^omantuism in the tP^ineteenth Century. 233 

freedom, the clear light, the noble and harmonious forms 
of the antique were as attractive as the twilight of the 
"ages of faith," with their mysticism, asceticism, and 
grotesque superstitions, were repulsive. Remote as their 
own feverish and exuberant poetry was from the unexcited 
manner of classical work, the latter was the ideal towards 
which they more and more inclined. The points at which 
these two poets touch our history, then, are few. Byron, 
to be sure, cast " Childe Harold " into Spenserian verse, 
and gave it a ballad title.* In the first canto there are 
a few archaisms; words like/^r<f, shent, and losel occur, 
together with Gothic properties, such as the "eremite's 
sad cell " and " Paynim shores " and Newstead's " mon- 
astic dome." The ballad "Adieu, adieu my native 
shore," was suggested by "Lord Maxwell's Good-Night" 
in the " Border Minstrelsy," and introduces some roman- 
tic appurtenances: the harp, the falcon, and the little 
foot-page. But this kind of falsetto, in the tradition of 
the last-century Spenserians, evidently hampered the 
poet; so he shook himself free from imitation after the 
opening stanzas, and spoke in his natural voice.f " Lara " 
is a tale of feudal days, with a due proportion of knights, 
dames, vassals, and pages; and an ancestral hall with 
gloomy vaults and portrait galleries, where 

" — the moonbeam shone 
Through the dim lattice o'er the floor of stone, 

*"It is almost superfluous to mention that the appellation 
'Childe,' as ' Childe Waters,' 'Childe Childers,' etc., is used 
as more consonant with the old structure of versification which 
I have adopted." — Preface to "Childe Harold." Byron ap- 
peals to a letter of Beattie relating to "The Minstrel," to jus- 
tify his choice of the stanza. 

f See vol. i., p. 98. 



234 ^ History of English 'T^omanticism. 

And the high fretted roof and saints that there 
O'er Gothic windows knelt in pictured prayer. . . . 
The waving banner and the clapping door, 
The rustling tapestry and the echoing floor ; 
The long dim shadows of surrounding trees, 
The flapping bats, the night-song of the breeze, 
Aught they behold or hear their thought appalls, 
As evening saddens o'er the dark grey walls." 

But these things are unimportant in Byron — mere com- 
monplaces of description inherited from Scott and Lewis 
and Mrs. Radcliffe. Neither is it of importance that 
"Parisina" is a tale of the year 1405, and has an echo 
in it of convent bells and the death chant of friars ; nor 
that the first scene of " Manfred " passes in a " Gothic 
gallery," and includes an incantation of spirits upon the 
model of " Faust " ; nor that " Marino Faliero " and " The 
Two Foscari " are founded on incidents of Venetian his- 
tory which happened in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen- 
turies respectively; nor yet that Byron translated the 
Spanish ballad " Woe is me Alhama " and a passage 
from Pulci's " Morgante Maggiore." * Similarly Shel- 
ley's experimental versions of the " Prolog im Himmel," 
and " Walpurgisnacht " in " Faust," and of scenes from 
Calderon's " Magico Prodigioso " are felt to be without 
special significance in comparison with the body of his 
writings. "Faust" impressed him, as it did Byron, and 
he urged Coleridge to translate it, speaking of the current 
English versions as wretched misrepresentations of the 
original. But in all of Shelley's poetry the scenery, 
architecture, and imagery in general are sometimes Ital- 
ian, sometimes Asiatic, often wholly fantastic, but never 
mediaeval. Their splendour is a classic splendour, and 

♦For Byron's and Shelley's dealings with Dante, vi'cie 
supra, pp. 99-102. 



^Diffused l^omanttcism in the Nineteenth Century. 235 

not what Milton contemptuously calls " a Hunnish and 
Norwegian stateliness," His favourite names are Greek : 
Cythna, lanthe, and the like. The ruined cathedral in 
" Queen Mab " — a poem only in its title romantic — is 
coupled with the ruined dungeon, in whose courts the 
children play; both alike "works of faith and slavery," 
symbols of the priestcraft and kingcraft which Shelley 
hated, now made harmless by the reign of Reason and 
Love in a regenerated universe. How different is the 
feeling which the empty cathedral inspires in Lowell; 
once thronged with worshippers, now pathetically lonely 
— a cliff, far inland, from which the sea of faith has for- 
ever withdrawn ! At the time when " Queen Mab " was 
written, Coleridge, Southey, and Landor's " Gebir " were 
Shelley's favourite reading. "He was a lover of the 
wonderful and wild in literature," says Mrs. Shelley, in 
her notes on the poem ; " but had not fostered these tastes 
at their genuine sources — the romances and chivalry of 
the Middle Ages — but in the perusal of such German 
works as were current in those days.* . . . Our earlier 
English poetry was almost unknown to him." 

"Queen Mab" begins with a close imitation of the 
opening lines of Southey's "Thalaba the Destroyer." 
The third member of the Lake School is a standing illus- 
tration of Mr. Colvin's contention that the distinction 
between classic and romantic is less in subject than in 
treatment. Southey regarded himself as, equally with 
Wordsworth and Coleridge, an innovator and a rebel 
against poetic conventions. His big Oriental epics, 
" Thalaba " and " The Curse of Kehama," are written in 

♦For the type of prose romance essayed by Shelley, see 
vol. i., p. 403. 



236 <i/l History of English ^Romanticism. 

verse purposely irregular, but so inferior in effect to the 
irregular verse of Coleridge and Scott as to prove that 
irregularity, as such, is only tolerable when controlled by 
the subtly varying lyric impulse — not when it is adopted 
as a literary method, Southey's worth as a man, his in- 
defatigable industry, his scholarship, and his excellent 
work in prose make him an imposing figure in our litera- 
ture. But his poetical reputation has faded more rapidly 
than that of his greater contemporaries. He ranged 
widely in search of subjects and experimented boldly in 
forms of verse; but his poems are seldom inspired; they 
are manufactures rather than creations, and to-day 
Southey, the poet, represents nothing in particular. 

But, like Taylor of Norwich, Southey, by his studies in 
foreign literature, added much to the romantic material 
constantly accumulating in the English tongue. In his 
two visits to the Peninsula he made acquaintance with 
Spanish and Portuguese ; and afterwards by his transla- 
tions and otherwise, helped his countrymen to a knowl- 
edge of the old legendary poetry of Spain, the country 
above all others of chivalry and romance. Mention has 
already been made of his versions of " Amadis of Gaul," 
"Palmerinof England," and the "Chronicle of the Cid." 
The last named was not a translation from any single 
source, but was put together from the " Poem of the Cid," 
which the translator considered to be " unquestionably 
the oldest poem in the language " and probably by a 
writer contemporary with the great Campeador himself ; 
from the prose " Chronicle " assigned to the thirteenth 
century; and from the ballads, which Southey thought 
mainly worthless, i.e., from the historical point of view. 

Southey's long blank verse poems on mediaeval sub- 



^Diffused l^omanficism in the V^ineUenth Century. 237 

jects, partly historical, partly legendary, "Joan of Arc" 
(1795), "Madoc" (1805), and " Roderick, the Last of the 
Goths" (1814), like his friend Landor's "Gebir," are 
examples of romantic themes with classical or, at least, 
unromantic handling. The last of them was the same in 
subject, indeed, with Landor's drama, " Count Julian." 
I have spoken of " Thalaba " and " The Curse of Ke- 
hama " as epics; but Southey rejected " the degraded title 
of epic " and scouted the rules of Aristotle. Neverthe- 
less, the best qualities of these blank verse narratives 
are of the classic-epic kind. The story is not badly told; 
the measure is correct if not distinguished ; and the style 
is simple, clear, and in pure taste. But the spell of 
romance, the witchery of Coleridge and Keats is absent; 
and so are the glow and movement of Scott. 

Southey got up his history and local colour conscien- 
tiously, and his notes present a formidable array of au- 
thorities. While engaged upon "Madoc," he went to 
Wales to verify the scenery and even came near to leas- 
ing a cottage and taking up his residence there. " The 
manners of the poem," he asserted, "will be found his- 
torically true." The hero of " Madoc " was a legendary 
Welsh prince of the twelfth century who led a colony to 
America. The motif of the poem is therefore nearly the 
same as in William Morris's " Earthly Paradise," and it 
is curious to compare the two. In Southey's hands the 
blank verse, which in the last century had been almost 
an ear-mark of the romanticising schools, is far more 
classical than the heroic couplet which Morris writes. 
In the Welsh portion of " Madoc " the historical back- 
ground is carefully studied from Giraldus Cambrensis, 
Evans' "Specimens," the "Triads of Bardism," the 



238 <iA History of English Romanticism. 

"Cambrian Biography," and similar sources; and in the 
Aztec portion, from old Spanish chronicles of the con- 
quest of Mexico and the journals of modern travellers 
in America. In "The Earthly Paradise" nothing is 
historical except the encounter with Edward III.'s fleet 
in the channel. Over all, the dreamlike vagueness and 
strangeness of romance. Yet the imaginative impression 
is more distinct; not an impression of reality, but as of a 
soft, bright miniature painting in an old manuscript. 

In common with his literary associates, Southey was 
prompted by Percy's " Reliques " to try his hand at the 
legendary ballad and at longer metrical tales like "All 
for Love" and "The Pilgrim to Compostella." Most of 
these pieces date from the last years of the century. One 
of them, " St. Patrick's Purgatory," was inserted by Lewis 
in his " Tales of Wonder." Another of the most popu- 
lar, and a capital specimen of grotesque, "The Old 
Woman of Berkeley," was upon a theme which was also 
undertaken by Taylor of Norwich and Dr. Sayers of the 
same city, when Southey was on a visit to the former in 
1798. The story, told by Olaus Magnus as well as by 
William of Malmesbury, was of a witch whose body was 
carried off by the devil, though her coffin had been sprin- 
kled with holy water and bound with a triple chain. For 
material Southey drew upon Spanish chronicles, French 
Jabliaux^ the " Acta Sanctorum," Matthew of Westminster, 
and many other sources. His ballads do not compare 
well with those of Scott and Coleridge. They abound 
in the supernatural — miracles of saints, sorceries, and 
apparitions; but the matter-of-fact narrative, common- 
place diction, and jog-trot verse are singularly out of 
keeping with the subject matter. The most wildly ro- 



T>iffused %omanticism in the C^Qineteenth Century. 239 

mantic situations become tamely unromantic under 
Southey's handling. Though in better taste than Lewis' 
grisly compositions, yet, as in Lewis, the want of " high 
seriousness '' or any finer imagination in these legendary 
tales makes them turn constantly towards the comic; so 
that Southey was scandalised to learn that Mr. Payne 
Collier had taken his "Old Woman of Berkeley" for a 
"mock ballad" or parody. He affected especially a 
stanza which he credited to Lewis' invention : 

"Behind a wide column, half breathless with fear 

She crept to conceal herself there ; 
That instant the moon o'er a dark cloud shone clear, 
And she saw in the moonlight two ruffians appear. 

And between them a corpse did they bear." * 

Southey employs no archaisms, no refrains, nor any of 
the stylistic marks of ancient minstrelsy. His ballads 
have the metrical roughness and plain speech of the old 
popular ballads, but none of their frequent, peculiar beau- 
ties of thought and phrase. 

Spain, no less than Germany and Italy, was laid under 
contribution by the English romantics. Southey's work 
in this direction was followed by such things as Lock- 
hart's "Spanish Ballads" (1824), Irving's "Alhambra," 
and Bryant's and Longfellow's translations from Spanish 
lyrical poetry. But these exotics did not stimulate orig- 
inal creative activity in England in equal degree with the 
German and Italian transplantings. They were im- 
ported, not appropriated. Of all European countries 
Spain had remained the most Catholic and mediaeval. 
Her eight centuries of struggle against the Moors had 
given her a rich treasure of legendary song and story. 

*"Mary, the Maid of the Inn." 



240 iA History of English l^manticism. 

She had a body of popular ballad poetry larger than 
either England's or Germany's.* But Spain had no 
modern literature to mediate between the old and newj 
nothing at all corresponding with the schools of romance 
in Germany, from Herder to Schlegel, which effected a 
revival of the Teutonic Middle Age and impressed it 
upon contemporary England and France. Neither could 
the Spanish Middle Age itself show any such supreme 
master as Dante, whose direct influence on English poetry 
has waxed with the century. There was a time when, for 
the greater part of a century, England and Spain were in 
rather close contact, but it was mainly a hostile contact, 
and its tangential points were the ill-starred marriage of 
Philip and Mary, the Great Armada of 1588, and the 
abortive " Spanish Marriage '* negotiations of James I.'s 
reign. Readers of our Elizabethan literature, however, 
cannot fail to remark a knowledge of, and interest in, 
Spanish affairs now quite strange to English writers. 
The dialogue of the old drama is full of Spanish phrases 
of convenience like bezo los manos^paucas palabras, etc., 
which were evidently quite as well understood by the 
audience as was later the colloquial French — savoir 
/aire, coup de grace, etc. — which began to come in with 
Dryden, and has been coming ever since. The comedy 
Spaniard, like Don Armado in "Love's Labour's Lost," 
was a familiar figure on the English boards. Middleton 
took the double plot of his "Spanish Gipsy" from two 
novels of Cervantes; and his "Game of Chess," a politi- 
cal allegorical play, aimed against Spanish intrigues, 
made a popular hit and was stopped, after a then unex- 

*Duran's great collection, begun in 1828, embraces nearly 
two thousand pieces. 



T)iffused %oinantictsm in the zJ^ineteenth Century. 241 

ampled run, in consequence of the remonstrances of Gon- 
domar, the Spanish ambassador. Somewhat later the 
Restoration stage borrowed situations from the Spanish 
love-intrigue comedy, not so much directly as by way of 
Moliere, Thomas Corneille, and other French playwrights ; 
and the duenna and the gracioso became stock figures in 
English performances. The direct influence of Calderon 
and Lope de Vega upon our native theatre was infinites- 
imal. The Spanish national drama, like the English, was 
self-developed and unaffected by classical rules. Like 
the English, it was romantic in spirit, but was more 
religious in subject and more lyrical in form. The land 
of romance produced likewise the greatest of all satires 
upon romance. " Don Quixote," of course, was early 
translated and imitated^in England; and the picaro ro- 
mances had an important influence upon the evolution of 
English fiction in De Foe and Smollett; not only di- 
rectly through books like "The Spanish Rogue," but by 
way of Le Sage,* But upon the whole, the relation between 
English and Spanish literature had been one of distant 
respect rather than of intimacy. There was never any 
such inrush of foreign domination from this quarter as 
from Italy in the sixteenth century, or from France in the 
thirteenth, fourteenth, and latter half of the seventeenth. 
The unequalled wealth of Spanish literature in popular 
ballads is partially explained by the facility with which 
such things were composed. The Spanish ballad, or 
romance^ was a stanza {redondilla, roundel) of four eight- 

* It is hardly necessary to mention early English transla- 
tions of " Palmerin of England " (1616) and " Amadis de Gaul " 
(1580), or to point out the influence of Montemayor's "Diana 
Enamorada " upon Sidney, Shakspere, and English pastoral 
romance in general. 



242 zA History of English Romanticism. 

syllable lines with a prevailing trachaic movement — just 
the metre, in short, of " Locksley Hall." Only the sec- 
ond and fourth lines rimed, and the rime was merely 
assonant or vowel rime. Given the subject and the 
lyrical impulse, and verses of this sort could be produced 
to order and in infinite number by poets of the humblest 
capacity. The subjects were furnished mainly by Span- 
ish history and legend, the exploits of national heroes 
like the Cid (Ruy Diaz de Bivar), the seven Princes of 
Lara, Don Fernan Gonzalez, and Bernaldo del Carpio, the 
leader in the Spanish versions of the great fight by Fon- 

tarabbia 

"When Rowland brave and Olivier, 
And every paladin and peer 
On Roncesvalles died." 

Southey thought the Spanish ballads much inferior to 
the English and Scotch, a judgment to which students of 
Spanish poetry will perhaps hardly agree.* The Span- 
ish ballads, like the British, are partly historical and 
legendary, partly entirely romantic or fictitious. They 
record not only the age-long wars against the Saracen, 

*"The English and Scotch ballads, with which they may 
most naturally be compared, belong to a ruder state of soci- 
ety, where a personal violence and coarseness prevailed 
which did not, indeed, prevent the poetry it produced from 
being full of energy, and sometimes of tenderness ; but which 
necessarily had less dignity and elevation than belong to the 
character, if not the condition, of a people who, like the Span- 
ish, were for centuries engaged in a contest ennobled by a 
sense of religion and loyalty — a contest which could not fail 
sometimes to raise the minds and thoughts of those engaged 
in it far above such an atmosphere as settled round the bloody 
feuds of rival barons or the gross maraudings of a border 
warfare. The truth of this will at once be felt, if we compare 
the striking series of ballads on Robin Hood with those on the 
Cid and Bernardo de Carpio ; or if we compare the deep trag- 
edy of Edom O' Gordon with that of the Conde Alarcos ; or. 



'Diffused 'T{ofnanticism in the V^ineteenth Century. 243 

the common enemy, but the internecine feuds of the Span- 
ish Christian kingdoms, the quarrels between the kings 
and their vassals, and many a dark tale of domestic 
treachery or violence. In these respects their resem- 
blance to the English and Scotch border ballads is obvi- 
ous; and it has been pointed out that they sprang from 
similar conditions, a frontier war for national independ- 
ence, maintained for centuries against a stubborn foe. 
The traditions concerning Wallace and the Bruce have 
some analogy with the chronicles of the Cid; but as to 
the border fights celebrated in Scott's " Minstrelsy," they 
were between peoples of the same race, tongue, and 
faith ; and were but petty squabbles in comparison ^vOith 
that epic crusade in which the remnants of the old Gothic 
conquerors slowly made head against, and finally over- 
threw and expelled, an Oriental religion, a foreign blood, 
and a civilisation in many respects more brilliant than 
anything which Europe could show. The contrast be- 
tween Castile and Granada is more picturesque than the 
difference between Lothian and Northumberland. The 
Spanish ballads have the advantage, then, of being con- 
nected with imposing passages of history. In spirit they 
are intensely national. Three motives animate them all: 
loyalty to the king, devotion to the cross, and the pun- 
donor : that sensitive personal honour — the "Castilian 
pride " of " Hernani," — which sometimes ran into fantas- 

what would be better than either, if we should sit down to the 
' Romancero General, ' with its poetical confusion of Moorish 
splendours and Christian loyalty, just when we have come 
fresh from Percy's ' Reliques ' or Scott's ' Minstrelsy ' " (" His- 
tory of Spanish Literature," George Ticknor, vol. i., p. 141, 
third American ed., 1866). The "Romancero General" was 
the great collection of some thousand ballads and lyrics pub- 
lished in 1602-14. 



244 <^ History of English ^Romanticism. 

tic excess. A rude chivalry occasionally softens the feroc- 
ity of feudal manners in Northern ballad-poetry, as in the 
speech of Percy over the dead Douglas in " Chevy Chase." 
But in the Spanish romances the knightly feeling is all- 
pervading. The warriors are hidalgos, gentlemen of a 
lofty courtesy ; the Moorish chieftains are not "heathen 
hounds," but chivalrous adversaries, to be treated, in de- 
feat, with a certain generosity. This refinement and 
magnanimity are akin to that ideality of temper which 
makes Don Quixote at once so noble and so ridiculous, 
and which is quite remote from the sincere realism of 
the British minstrelsy. In style the Spanish ballads 
are simple, forcible, and direct, but somewhat monot- 
onous in their facility. The English and Scotch have 
a wider range of subject; the best of them have a con- 
densed energy of expression and a depth of tragic feeling 
which is more potent than the melancholy grace of the 
Spanish. Women take a more active part in the former, 
the Christians of the Peninsula having caught from their 
Saracen foes a prejudice in favour of womanly seclusion 
and retirement. There is also a wilder imagination in 
Northern balladry; a much larger element of the mytho- 
logical and supernatural. Ghosts, demons, fairies, en- 
chanters are rare in the Spanish poems. Where the 
marvellous enters into them at all, it is mostly in the 
shape of saintly miracles. St. James of Compostella 
appears on horseback among the Christian hosts battling 
with the Moors, or even in the army of the Conquista- 
dores in Mexico — an incident which Macaulay likens to 
the apparition of the "great twin Brethren" in the Roman 
battle of Lake Regillus. The mediaeval Spaniards were 
possibly to the full as superstitious as their Scottish con- 



^Diffused Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century. 245 

temporaries, but their superstitions were the legends of 
the Catholic Church, not the inherited folklore of Gothic 
and Celtic heathendom. I will venture to suggest, as 
one reason of this difference, the absence of forests in 
Spain. The shadowy recesses of northern Europe were 
the natural haunts of mystery and unearthly terrors. The 
old Teutonic forest, the Schwarzwald and the Hartz, were 
peopled by the popular imagination with were-wolves, 
spectre huntsmen, wood spirits, and all those nameless 
creatures which Tieck has revived in his " Mahrchen " 
and Hauptmann in the Rautendelein of his " Versunkene 
Glocke." The treeless plateaus of Spain, and her stony, 
denuded sierras, all bare and bright under the hot south- 
ern sky, offered no more shelter to such beings of the 
mind than they did to the genial life of Robin Hood and 
his merry men "all under the greenwood tree." And 
this mention of the bold archer of Sherwood recalls one 
other difference — the last that need here be touched upon 
— between the ballads of Spain and of England. Both 
constitute a body of popular poetry, i.e., of folk poetry. 
They recount the doings of the upper classes, princes, 
nobles, knights, and ladies, as seen from the angle of ob- 
servation of humble minstrels of low degree. But the 
people count for much more in the English poems. The 
Spanish are more aristocratic, more public, less domestic, 
and many of them composed, it is thought, by lordly 
makers. This is perhaps, in part, a difference in na- 
tional character; and, in part, a difference in the condi- 
tions under which the social institutions of the two coun- 
tries were evolved. 

Spain collected her ballads early in numerous song- 
books — cancioneros, romanceros — the first of which, the 



^. 



246 tt/^ History of English ^Romanticism. 

"Cancionero" of 15 10, is "the oldest collection of 
popular poetry, properly so-called, that is to be found in 
any European literature." * But modern Spain had gone 
through her classic period, like England and Germany. 
She had submitted to the critical canons of Boileau, and 
was in leading-strings to France till the end of the 
eighteenth century. Spain, too, had her romantic move- 
ment, and incidentally her ballad revival, but it came 
later than in England and Germany, later even than in 
France. Historians of Spanish literature inform us that 
the earliest entry of French romanticism into Spain took 
place in Martinez de la Rosa's two dramas, "The Con- 
spiracy of Venice" (1834) and " Aben-Humeya," first 
written in French and played at Paris in 1830; and that 
the representation of Duke de Rivas' play, " Don Alvaro " 
(1835), was " an event in the history of the modern Span- 
ish drama corresponding to the production of ' Hernani ' 
at the Theatre Frangais " in 1830.! Both of these authors 
had lived in France and had there made acquaintance 
with the works of Chateaubriand, Byron, and Walter 
Scott. Spain came in time to have her own Byron and 
her own Scott; the former in Jose de Espronceda, author 
of " The Student of Salamanca," who resided for a time 
in London; the latter in Jose Zorrilla, whose "Granada," 
"Legends of the Cid," etc., "were popular for the same 
reason that * Marmion ' and ' The Lady of the Lake ' were 
popular; for their revival of national legends in a form 
both simple and picturesque " I Scott himself is reported 

*"The Ancient Ballads of Spain." R. Ford, in Edinburgh 
Review, No. 146. 

t"A History of Spanish Literature." By James Fitz- 
Maurice Kelly, New York, 1898, pp. 366-67. 

Xlbid., pp. 368-73. 



diffused l^manticism in the ihQineteentb Century. 247 

to have said that if he had come across in his younger 
days Perez de Hita's old historical romance, "The Civil 
Wars of Granada" (1595), "he would have chosen Spain 
as the scene of a Waverley novel." * 

But when Lockhart, in 1824, set himself to 

" — relate 
In high-born words the worth of many a knight 
From tawny Spain, lost in the world's debate " — 

her ballad poetry had fallen into disfavour at home, and 
" no Spanish Percy, or Ellis, or Ritson," he complains, 
"has arisen to perform what no one but a Spaniard can 
entertain the smallest hope of achieving." f Meanwhile, 
however, the German romantic school had laid eager 
hands upon the old romantic literature of Spain. A. 
W. Schlegel (1803) and Gries had made translations from 
Calderon in assonant verse ; and Friedrich Schlegel — 
who exalted the Spanish dramatist above Shakspere, 
much to Heine's disgust — had written, also in asonante, 
his dramatic poem "Conde Alarcos" (1802), founded on 
the well-known ballad. Brentano and others of the ro- 
mantics went so far as to practise assonance in their orig- 
inal as well as translated work. Jacob Grimm (18 15) 
and, Depping (1817) edited selections from the " Ro- 
mancero " which Lockhart made use of in his " Ancient 
Spanish Ballads." With equal delight the French ro- 
manticists — Hugo and Musset in particular — seized upon 
the treasures of the " Romancero " ; but this was some- 
what later. 

Lockhart's " Spanish Ballads," which were bold and 

♦Kelly, p. 270. 

f The collection of Sanchez (1779) is described as an imita- 
tion of the " Reliques " (Edinburgh Review, No. 146). 



248 zA History of English '^Romanticism. 

spirited paraphrases rather than close versions of the 
originals, enjoyed a great success, and have been repeat- 
edly reprinted. Ticknor pronounced them undoubtedly 
a work of genius, as much so as any book of the sort in 
any literature with which he was acquainted.* In the 
very same year Sir John Bowring published his "An- 
cient Poetry and Romance of Spain." Hookham Frere, 
that most accomplished of translators, also gave speci- 
mens from the " Romancero." Of late years versions in 
increasing numbers of Spanish poetry of all kinds, an- 
cient and modern, by Ormsby, Gibson, and others too 
numerous to name, have made the literature of the coun- 
try largely accessible to English readers. But to Lock- 
hart belongs the credit of having established for the 
English public the convention of romantic Spain — the 
Spain of lattice and guitar, of mantilla and Castanet, arti- 
cles now long at home in the property room of romance, 
along with the gondola of Venice, the " clock-face " trou- 
badour, and the castle on the Rhine. The Spanish brand 
of mediaevalism would seem, for a number of years, to 
have substituted itself in England for the German ; and 
doubtless a search through the annuals and gift books and 
fashionable fiction and minor poetry generally, of the 
years from 1825 to 1840, would disclose a decided Cas- 
tilian colouring. To such effect, at least, is the testi- 
mony of the Edinburgh reviewer — from whom I have 
several times quoted— reviewing in January, 1841, the 
new and sumptuously illustrated edition of " Ancient 
Spanish Ballads." " Mr. Lockhart's success," he writes, 
"rendered the subject fashionable; we have, however, no 

*He preferred, however, Sir Edmund Head's rendering of 
the ballad "Lady Alda's Dream" to Lockhart's version. 



THffused l^omanticism in the i^ineteenth Century. 249 

space to bestow on the minor fry who dabbled in these 
, . . fountains. Those who remember their number may 
possibly deprecate our re-opening the floodgates of the 
happily subsided inundation." 

The popular ballad, indeed, is, next after the historical 
romance, the literary form to which the romantic move- 
ment has given, in the highest degree, a renewal of pros- 
perous life. Every one has written ballads, and the 
" burden " has become a burden even as the grasshopper 
is such. The very parodists have taken the matter in 
hand. The only Calverley made excellent sport of the 
particular variety cultivated by Jean Ingelow. And Sir 
Frederick Pollock, as though actuated by Lowell's hint, 
about " a declaration of love under the forms of a declara- 
tion in trover," cast the law reports into ballad phrase in 
his "Leading Cases Done into English " (1876): 

"It was Thomas Newman and five his feres 
(Three more would have made them nine) , 
And they entered into John Vaux's house, 
That had the Queen's Head to sign. 
The birds on the bough sing loud and sing low, 
What trespass shall be ab itiitio. " 

Of course the great majority of these poems in the bal- 
lad form, whether lyric or narrative, or a mixture of both, 
are in no sense romantic. They are like Wordsworth's 
"Lyrical Ballads," idyllic; songs of the affections, of 
nature, sentiment, of war, the sea, the hunting field, rus- 
tic life, and a hundred other moods and topics. Neither 
are the historical or legendary ballads, deriving from 
Percy and reinforced by Scott, prevailingly romantic in 
the sense of being mediaeval. They are such as Macau- 
lay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," in which — with ample 
acknowledgment in his introduction both to Scott and 



250 c^ History of English l^manticism. 

to the "Reliques" — he applies the form of the English 
minstrel ballad to an imaginative re-creation of the lost 
popular poetry of early Rome. Or they continue Scott's 
Jacobite tradition, like " Aytoun's Lays of the Scottish 
Cavaliers," Browning's "Cavalier Tunes," Thornbury's 
"Songs of the Cavaliers and Roundheads" (1857), and 
a few of Motherwell's ditties. These last named, except 
Browning, were all Scotchmen and staunch Tories; as 
were likewise Lockhart and Hogg; and, for obvious rea- 
sons, it is in Scotland that the simpler fashion of ballad 
writing, whether in dialect or standard English, and more 
especially as employed upon martial subjects, has flour- 
ished longest. Artifice and ballad preciosity have been 
cultivated more sedulously in the south, with a learned 
use of the repetend, archaism of style, and imitation of 
the quaint mediaeval habit of mind. 

Of the group most immediately connected with Scott 
and who assisted him, more or less, in his " Minstrelsy " 
collection, may be mentioned the eccentric John Leyden, 
immensely learned in Border antiquities and poetry; and 
James Hogg, the " Ettrick Shepherd." The latter was a 
peasant bard, an actual shepherd and afterward a sheep 
farmer, a self-taught man with little schooling, who 
aspired to become a second Burns, and composed much of 
his poetry while lying out on the hills, wrapped in his 
plaid and tending his flocks like any Corydon or Thyrsis. 
He was a singular mixture of genius and vanity, at once 
the admiration and the butt of the Blackwood's wits, who 
made him the mouthpiece of humour and eloquence which 
were not his, but Christopher North's. The puzzled shep- 
herd hardly knew how to take it; he was a little gratified 
and a good deal nettled. But the flamboyant figure of him 



'Diffused Romanticism in the z^Qineteenth Century. 2 5 1 

in the Nodes will probably do as much as his own verses 
to keep his memory alive with posterity. Nevertheless, 
Hogg is one of the best of modern Scotch ballad poets. 
Having read the first two volumes of the " Border Min- 
strelsy," he was dissatisfied with some of the modern bal- 
lad imitations therein and sent his criticisms to Scott, 
They were sound criticisms, for Hogg had an intimate 
knowledge of popular poetry and a quick perception of 
what was genuine and what was spurious in such compo- 
sitions. Sir Walter called him in aid of his third vol- 
ume and found his services of value. 

As a Border minstrel, Hogg ranks next to Scott — is, 
in fact, a sort of inferior Scott. His range was narrower, 
but he was just as thoroughly saturated with the legend- 
ary lore of the countryside, and in some respects he stood 
closer to the spirit of that peasant life in which popular 
poetry has its source. As a ballad poet, indeed, he is 
not always Scott's inferior, though even his ballads are 
apt to be too long and without the finish and the instinct 
for selection which marks the true artist. When he es- 
sayed metrical romances in numerous cantos, his defi- 
ciencies in art became too fatally evident. Scott, in his 
longer poems, is often profuse and unequal, but always 
on a much higher level than Hogg. The latter had no 
skill in conducting to the end a fable of some complex- 
ity, involving a number of varied characters and a really 
dramatic action. " Mador of the Moor," e.g., is a mani- 
fest and not very successful imitation of " The Lady of 
the Lake " ; and it requires a strong appetite for the ro- 
mantic to sustain a reader through the six parts of " Queen 
Hynde" and the four parts of "The Pilgrims of the 
Sun." By general consent, the best of Hogg's more am- 



252 e/f History of English 'T^omanticism. 

bitious poems is " The Queen's Wake," and the best thing 
in it is "Kilmeny." "The Queen's Wake" (1813) com- 
bines, in its narrative plan, the framework of " The Lay 
of the Last Minstrel " with the song competition in its 
sixth canto. Mary Stuart, on landing in Scotland, holds 
a Christmas wake at Holyrood, where seventeen bards 
contend before her for the prize of song. The lays are 
in many different moods and measures, but all enclosed 
in a setting of octosyllabic couplets, closely modelled 
upon Scott; and the whole ends with a tribute to the 
great minstrel who had waked once more the long silent 
Harp of the North. The thirteenth bard's song — " Kil- 
meny" — is of the type of traditionary tale familiar in 
"Tam Lin" and "Thomas of Ercildoune," and tells how 
a maiden was spirited away to fairyland, where she saw 
a prophetic vision of her country's future (including the 
Napoleonic wars) and returned after a seven years' ab- 
sence. 

"Late, late in a gloamin' when all was still, 
When the fringe was red on the westlin hill, 
The wood was sere, the moon i' the wane. 
The reek o' the cot hung o'er the plain. 
Like a little wee cloud in the world its lane ; 
When the ingle lowed wi' an eiry leme. 
Late, late in the gloamin' Kilmeny came hame." 

The Ettrick Shepherd's peculiar province was not so 
much the romance of national history as the field of Scot- 
tish fairy lore and popular superstition. It was he, rather 
than Walter Scott, who carried out the suggestions long 
since made to his countryman, John Home, in Collins' 
"Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands." His 
poems are full of bogles, kelpies, brownies, warlocks, and 
all manner of " grammarie." " The Witch of Fife " in 



T>iffused %omanttcism in the Nineteenth Century. 253 

"The Queen's Wake," a spirited bit of grotesque, is re- 
peatedly quoted as authority upon the ways of Scotch 
witches in the notes to Croker's " Fairy Legends and 
Traditions of the South of Ireland." Similar themes 
engaged the poet in his prose tales. Some of these were 
mere modern ghost stories, or stories of murder, robbery, 
death warnings, etc. Others, like " The Heart of Eil- 
don," dealt with ancient legends of the supernatural. 
Still others, like "The Brownie of Bodsbeck: a Tale of 
the Covenanters," were historical novels of the Stuart 
times. Here Hogg was on Scott's own ground and did 
not shine by comparison. He complained, indeed, that 
in the last-mentioned tale, he had been accused of copy- 
ing " Old Mortality " ; but asserted that he had written 
his book the first and had been compelled by the appear- 
ance of Sir Walter's, to go over his own manuscript and 
substitute another name for Balfour of Burley, his origi- 
nal hero. Nanny's songs, in "The Brownie of Bods- 
beck," are among Hogg's best ballads. Others are scat- 
tered through his various collections — " The Mountain 
Bard," "The Forest Minstrel," "Poetical Tales and Bal- 
lads," etc. 

Another Scotch balladist was William Motherwell, 
one of the most competent of ballad scholars and editors, 
whose " Minstrelsy : Ancient and Modern," was issued 
at Glasgow in 1827, and led to a correspondence between 
the collector and Sir Walter Scott.* In 1836 Mother- 
well was associated with Hogg in editing Burns' works. 
His original ballads are few in number, and their faults 
and merits are of quite an opposite nature from his col- 
laborator's. The shepherd was a man of the people, and 
* Scott and Motherwell never met in person. 



254 <^ History of English l^pinanticisin. 

lived, so far as any modern can, among the very condi- 
tions which produced the minstrel songs. He inherited 
the popular beliefs. His great-grandmother on one side 
was a notorious witch; his grandfather on the other side 
had "spoken with the fairies." His poetry, such as it 
is, is fluent and spontaneous. Motherwell's, on the con- 
trary, is the work of a ballad fancier, a student learned 
in lyric, reproducing old modes with conscientious art. 
His balladry is more condensed and skilful than Hogg's, 
but seems to come hard to him. It is literary poetry 
trying to be Volkspoesie, and not quite succeeding. Many 
of the pieces in the southern English, such as " Halbert 
the Grim," "The Troubadour's Lament," "The Crusad- 
er's Farewell," "The Warthman's Wail," "The Demon 
Lady," "The Witches' Joys," and "Lady Margaret," 
have an echo of Elizabethan music, or the songs of Love- 
lace, or, now and then, the verse of Coleridge or Byron. 
"True Love's Dirge," e.g., borrows a burden from Shak- 
spere — "Heigho! the Wind and Rain." Others, like 
"Lord Archibald: A Ballad," and " Elfinland Wud: An 
Imitation of the Ancient Scottish Romantic Ballad," are 
in archaic Scotch dialect with careful ballad phrasing. 
Hogg employs the broad Scotch, but it is mostly the ver- 
nacular of his own time. A short passage from " The 
Witch of Fife " and one from " Elfin Wud " will illustrate 
two very different types of ballad manner: 

" He set ane reid-pipe till his muthe 
And he playit se bonnileye, 
Till the gray curlew and the black-cock flew 
To listen his melodye. 

" It rang se sweit through the grim Lomraond, 
That the nycht-winde lowner blew : 



Tfiffused l^manticism in the U^ineteenth Century. 255 

And it soupit alang the Loch Leven, 
And wakenit the white sea-mew. 

"It rang se sweit through the grim Lommond, 
Se sweitly but and se shill, 
That the wezilis laup out of their mouldy holis, 
And dancit on the mydnycht hill." 

"Around her slepis the quhyte muneschyne, 
(Meik is mayden undir kell) , 
Hir lips bin lyke the blude reid wyne ; 
(The rois of flouris hes sweitest smell) . 

"It was al bricht quhare that ladie stude, 

(Far my luve fure ower the sea) . 

Bot dern is the lave of Elfinland wud, 

(The Knicht pruvit false that ance luvit me). 

"The ladle's handis were quhyte als milk, 
(Ringis my luve wore mair nor ane) . 
Hir skin was safter nor the silk ; 

(Lilly bricht schinis my luve's halse bane)." 

Upon the whole, the most noteworthy of Motherwell's 
original additions to the stores of romantic verse were 
his poems on subjects from Norse legend and mythology, 
and particularly the three spirited pieces that stand first 
in his collection (1832)— "The Battle-Flag of Sigurd," 
"The Wooing Song of Jarl Egill Skallagrim," and "The 
Sword Chant of Thorstein Randi." These stand midway 
between Gray's " Descent of Odin " and the later work 
of Longfellow, William Morris and others. Since Gray, 
little or nothing of the kind had been attempted ; and 
Motherwell gave perhaps the first expression in English 
song of the Berserkir rage and the Viking passion for 
battle and sea roving. 

During the nineteenth century English romance re- 
ceived new increments of heroic legend and fairy lore 
from the Gaelic of Ireland. It was not until 1867 that 
Matthew Arnold, in his essay " On the Study of Celtic 



256 <iA History of English l^omanttcism. 

Literature," pleading for a chair of Celtic at Oxford, be- 
spoke the attention of the English public to those ele- 
ments in the national literature which come from the 
Celtic strain in its blood. Arnold knew very little Cel- 
tic, and his essay abounds in those airy generalisations 
which are so irritating to more plodding critics. His 
theory, e.g., that English poetry owes its sense for colour 
to the Celts, when taken up and stated nakedly by fol- 
lowing writers, seems too absolute in its ascription of 
colour-blindness to the Teutonic races. Still, Arnold 
probably defined fairly enough the distinctive traits of 
the Celtic genius. He attributes to a Celtic source much 
of the turn of English poetry for style, much of its turn 
for melancholy, and nearly all its turn for "natural 
magic." " The forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the 
wild flowers, are everywhere in romance. They have a 
mysterious life and grace there; they are Nature's own 
children, and utter her secret in a way which makes them 
something quite different from the woods, waters, and 
plants of Greek and Latin poetry. Now, of this delicate 
magic, Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a mistress that 
it seems impossible to believe the power did not come 
into romance from the Celts." 

In 1825 T. Crofton Croker published the first volume 
of his delightful " Fairy Legends and Traditions of the 
South of Ireland." It was immediately translated into 
German by the Grimm brothers, and was received with 
enthusiasm by Walter Scott, who was introduced to the 
author in London in 1826, and a complimentary letter 
from whom was printed in the preface to the second 
edition. 

Croker's book opened a new world of romance, and 



^Diffused l^manticism in the zN^ineteenth Century. 257 

introduced the English reader to novel varieties of elf 
creatures, with outlandish Gaelic names; the Shefro; the 
Boggart; the Phooka, or horse-fiend; the Banshee, a fa- 
miliar spirit which moans outside the door when a deatk 
impends; the Cluricaune,* or cellar goblin; the Fir 
Darrig (Red Man); the Dullahan, or Headless Horse- 
man. There are stories of changelings, haunted castles, 
buried treasure, the " death coach," the fairy piper, en- 
chanted lakes which cover sunken cities, and similar 
matters not unfamiliar in the folk-lore of other lands, but 
all with an odd twist to them and set against a back- 
ground of the manners and customs of modern Irish 
peasantry. The Celtic melancholy is not much in evi- 
dence in this collection. The wild Celtic fancy is pres- 
ent, but in combination with Irish gaiety and light- 
heartedness. It was the day of the comedy Irishman — • 
Lover's and Lever's Irishman — Handy Andy, Rory 
O'More, Widow Machree and the like. It took the fam- 
ine of '49 and the strenuous work of the Young Ireland 
Party which gathered about the Nation in 1848, to dis- 
place this traditional figure in favour of a more earnest 
and tragical national type. But a single quotation will 
illustrate the natural magic of which Arnold speaks: 
"The Merrow (mermaid) put the comb in her pocket, 
and then bent down her head and whispered some words 
to the water that was close to the foot of the rock. Dick 

* Mr. Churton Collins thinks that the lines in " Guinevere " — 

" Down in the cellars merry bloated things 
Shouldered the spigot, straddling on the butts 
While the wine ran " — 

was suggested by Croker's description of the Cluricaune. 
(" Illustrations of Tennyson " (1891), p. 152.) 



258 n/l History of English '^Romanticism. 

saw the murmur of the words upon the top of the sea, 
going out towards the wide ocean, just like a breath of 
wind rippling along, and, says he, in the greatest won- 
der, ' Is it speaking you are, my darling, to the salt 
water? ' 

"'It's nothing else,' says she, quite carelessly; 'I'm 
just sending word home to my father not to be waiting 
breakfast for me.' " Except for its lack of " high seri- 
ousness," this is the imagination that makes myths. 

Catholic Ireland still cherishes popular beliefs which 
in England, and even in Scotland, have long been merely 
antiquarian curiosities. In her poetry the fairies are 
never very far away. 

"Up the airy mountain, 
Down the rushy glen 
We daren't go a-hunting 
For fear of little men. " * 

Irish critics, to be sure, tell us that Allingham's fairies 
are English fairies, and that he had no Gaelic, though he 
knew and loved his Irish countryside. He was a Prot- 
estant and a loyalist, and lived in close association with 
the English Pre-Raphaelites — with Rossetti especially, 
who made the illustration for "The Maids of Elfin- 
Mere" in Allingham's volume "The Music Master" 
(1855). The Irish fairies, it is said, are beings of a 
darker and more malignant breed than Shakspere's 
elves. Yet in Allingham's poem they stole little Brid- 
get and kept her seven years, till she died of sorrow and 
lies asleep on the lake bottom: even as in Ferguson's 
weird ballad, " The Fairy Thorn," the good people carry 
off fair Anna Grace from the midst of her three compan- 
*"The Fairies." William Allingham. 



T)iffused %omanticism in the (Nineteenth Century. 259 

ions, who " pined away and died within the year and 
day." 

To the latter half of the century belongs the so-called 
Celtic revival, which connects itself with the Nationalist 
movement in politics and is partly literary and partly pa- 
triotic. It may be doubted whether, for practical pur- 
poses, the Gaelic will ever come again into general use. 
But the concerted endeavour by a whole nation to win 
back its ancient, wellnigh forgotten speech is a most in- 
teresting social phenomenon. At all events, both by 
direct translations of the Gaelic hero epics and by origi- 
nal work in which the Gaelic spirit is transfused through 
English ballad and other verse forms, a lost kingdom of 
romance has been recovered and a bright green thread 
of Celtic poetry runs through the British anthology of the 
century. The names of the pioneers and leading contrib- 
utors to this movement are significant of the varied strains 
of blood which compose Irish nationality. James Clar- 
ence Mangan was a Celt of the Celts; Joseph Sheridan 
Le Fanu and Aubrey de Vere were of Norman-Irish 
stock, and the former was the son of a dean of the Es- 
tablished Church, and himself the editor of a Tory news- 
paper; Sir Samuel Ferguson was an Ulster Protestant of 
Scotch descent; Dr. George Sigerson is of Norse blood; 
Whitley Stokes, the eminent Celtic scholar, and Dr. John 
Todhunter, author of "Three Bardic Tales" (1896), bear 
Anglo-Saxon surnames; the latter is the son of Quaker 
parents and was educated at English Quaker schools. 

Mangan's paraphrases from the Gaelic, "Poets and 
Poetry of Munster," appeared posthumously in 1850. 
They include a number of lyrics, wildly and mournfully 
beautiful, inspired by the sorrows of Ireland : " Dark 



2 6o c/l History of English Romanticism. 

Rosaleen," "Lament for the Princes of Tir-Owen and 
Tir-Connell," "O'Hussey's Ode to the Maguire," etc. 
The ballad form was not practised by the ancient Gaelic 
epic poets. In choosing it as the vehicle for their ren- 
derings from vernacular narrative poetry, the modern 
Irish poets have departed widely from the English and 
Scottish model, employing a variety of metres and not 
seeking to conform their diction to the manner of the 
ballads in the " Reliques " or the " Border Minstrelsy." 
Ferguson's "Lays of the Western Gael" (1865) is a 
series of historical ballads, original in effect, though 
based upon old Gaelic chronicles. "Congal" (1872) is 
an epic, founded on an ancient bardic tale, and written 
in Chapman's "fourteener" and reminding the reader 
frequently of Chapman's large, vigorous manner, his 
compound epithets and spacious Homeric similes. The 
same epic breadth of manner was applied to the treat- 
ment of other hero legends, " Conary," " Deirdre," etc., 
in a subsequent volume (1880). " Deirdre," the finest 
of all the old Irish stories, was also handled independ- 
ently by the late Dr. R. D. Joyce in the verse and man- 
ner of William Morris' " Earthly Paradise." * Among 
other recent workers in this field are Aubrey de Vere, a 
volume of selections from whose poetry appeared at New 
York in 1894, edited by Prof. G. E. Woodberry: George 
Sigerson, whose "Bards of the Gael and the Gall," a 

*See vol. i., p. 314. Dr. Joyce was for some years a resi- 
dent of Boston, where his "Ballads of Irish Chivalry" were 
published in 1872. His "Deirdre" received high praise from 
J. R. Lowell. Tennyson's "Voyage of Maeldune " (1880) 
probably had its source in Dr. P. W. Jo3^ce's "Old Celtic 
Romances" (1879) (Collins' "Illustrations of Tennyson," p. 
163). Swinburne pronounced Ferguson's " Welshmen of Ti- 
rawley " one of the best of modern ballads. 



T>iffused ^{omanticism in the Nineteenth Century. 261 

volume of translations from the Irish in the original me- 
tres, was issued in 1897; Whitley Stokes, an accom- 
plished translator, and the joint editor (with Windisch) 
of the " Irische Texte " ; John Todhunter, author of " The 
Banshee and Other Poems" (1888) and "Three Bardic 
Tales" (1896); Alfred Perceval Graves, author of "Irish 
Folk Songs" (1897), and many other volumes of national 
lyrics; and William Larminie — "West Irish Folk Tales 
and Romances" (1893), etc. 

The Celtism of this Gaelic renascence is of a much 
purer and more genuine character than the Celtism of 
Macpherson's " Ossian." Yet with all its superiority in 
artistic results, it is improbable that it will make any 
such impression on Europe or England as Macpherson 
made. " Ossian " was the first revelation to the world 
of the Celtic spirit: sophisticated, rhetorical, yet still the 
first; and it is not likely that its success will be repeated. 
In.the very latest school of Irish verse, represented by 
such names as Lionel Johnson, J. B, Yeats, George W. 
Russell, Nora Hopper, the mystical spirit which inhab- 
its the "Celtic twilight" turns into modern symbolism, 
so that some of their poems on legendary subjects bear 
a curious resemblance to the contemporary work of Mae- 
terlinck: to such things as "Aglivaine et Salysette" or 
" Les Sept Princesses." * 

The narrative ballad is hardly one of the forms of high 

* For a survey of this department of romantic literature the 
reader is referred to "A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the Eng- 
lish Tongue." Edited by Stopford A. Brooke and T. W. Rol- 
leston (New York, 1900). There are a quite astonishing 
beauty and force in many of the pieces in this collection, 
though some of the editors' claims seem excessive; as, e.g., 
that Mr. Yeats is "the first of living writers in the English 
language." 



262 c// History of English Romanticism. 

art, like the epic, the tragedy, the Pindaric ode. It is 
simple and not complex like the sonnet: not of the aris- 
tocracy of verse, but popular — not to say plebeian — in its 
associations. It is easy to write and, in its commonest 
metrical shape of eights and sixes, apt to run into sing- 
song. Its limitations, even in the hands of an artist like 
Coleridge or Rossetti, are obvious. It belongs to "mi- 
nor poetry." The ballad revival has not been an unmixed 
blessing and is responsible for much slip-shod work. If 
Dr. Johnson could come back from the shades and look 
over our recent verse, one of his first comments would 
probably be: "Sir, you have too many ballads." Be it 
understood that the romantic ballad only is here in ques- 
tion, in which the poet of a literary age seeks to catch 
and reproduce the tone of a childlike, unself-conscious 
time, so that his art has almost inevitably something ar- 
tificial or imitative. Here and there one stands out from 
the mass by its skill or luck in overcoming the difficulty. 
There is Hawker's " Song of the Western Men," which 
Macaulay and others quoted as historical, though only 
the refrain was old : 

"And shall Trelawney die? 
Here's twenty thousand Cornish men 
Will know the reason why ! " * 

There is Sydney Dobell's " Keith of Ravelston," f which 

* Robert Stephen Hawker was vicar of Morwenstow, near 
"wild Tintagil by the Cornish Sea," where Tennyson visited 
him in 1848. Hawker himself made contributions to Arthu- 
rian poetry, " Queen Gwynnevar' s Round " and " The Quest of 
the Sangreal " (1864) . He was converted to the Roman Cath- 
olic faith on his death-bed. 

t Given in Palgrave's "Golden Treasury, " second series. 
Rossetti wrote of Dobell's ballad in 1868: "I have always 
regarded that poem as being one of the finest, of its length, in 
any modern poet ; ranking with Keats' ' La Belle Dame sans 



'Diffused '^tnanticism in the [Nineteenth Century. 263 

haunts the memory with the insistent iteration of its re- 
frain : — 

"The murmur of the mourning ghost 
That keeps the shadowy kine ; 
Oh, Keith of Ravelston, 
The sorrows of thy line ! " 

And again there is Robert Buchanan's " Ballad of Judas 
Iscariot " which Mr. Stedman compares for " weird im- 
pressiveness and power " with " The Ancient Mariner." 
The mediaeval feeling is most successfully captured in 
this poem. It recalls the old " Debate between the Body 
and Soul," and still more the touches of divine compas- 
sion which soften the rigours of Catholic theology in the 
legends of the saints. It strikes the keynote, too, of that 
most modern ballad mode which employs the narrative 
only to emphasize some thought of universal application. 
There is salvation for all, is the thought, even for the 
blackest soul of the world, the soul that betrayed its 
Maker.* Such, though after a fashion more subtly intel- 
lectual, is the doctrinal use to which this popular form is 
put by one of the latest English ballad makers, Mr. John 
Davidson. Read, e.g., his " Ballad of a Nun," f the story 
of which was told in several shapes by the Spanish poet 
Alfonso the Learned (1226-84). A runaway nun returns 

Merci ' and the other masterpieces of the condensed and 
hinted order so dear to imaginative minds." The use of the 
family name Keith in Rossetti's "Rose Mary" was a coinci- 
dence. His poem was published (1854) some years before 
Dobell's. He thought of substituting some other name for 
Keith, but could find none to suit him, and so retained it. 

* Cf. Matthew Arnold's "St. Brandan," suggested by a 
passage in the old Irish "Voyage of Bran." The traitor Ju- 
das is allowed to come up from hell and cool himself on an 
iceberg every Christmas night because he had once given his 
cloak to a leper in the streets of Joppa. 

f "Ballads and Songs," London, 1895. 



264 <^ History of English %ofnanticism. 

in penitence to her convent, and is met at the gate by the 
Virgin Mary, who has taken her likeness and kept her 
place for her during the years of her absence. Or read 
"A New Ballad of Tannhauser," * which contradicts 
" the idea of the inherent impurity of nature " by an in- 
terpretation of the legend in a sense quite the reverse of 
Wagner's. Tannhauser's dead staff blossoms not as a 
sign of forgiveness, but to show him that "there was no 
need to be forgiven." The modern balladist attacks the 
ascetic Middle Age with a shaft from its own quiver. 

But it is time to turn from minor poets to acknowledged 
masters; and above all to the greatest of modern English 
artists in verse, the representative poet of the Victorian 
era. Is Tennyson to be classed with the romantics? His 
workmanship, when most truly characteristic, is romantic 
in the sense of being pictorial and ornate, rather than 
classically simple or severe. He assimilated the rich 
manner of Keats, whose influence is perceptible in his 
early poems. His art, like Keats', is eclectic and rem- 
iniscent, choosing for its exercise with equal impartial- 
ity whatever was most beautiful in the world of Grecian 
fable or the world of mediseval legend. But unlike 
Keats, he lived to add new strings to his lyre; he went 
on to sing of modern life and thought, of present-day 
problems in science and philosophy, of contemporary 
politics, the doubt, unrest, passion, and faith of his own 
century. To find work of Tennyson's that is romantic 
throughout, in subject, form, and spirit alike, we must 
look among his earlier collections (1830, 1832, 1842). 
For this was a phase which he passed beyond, as Millais 
outgrew his youthful Pre-Raphaelitism, or as Goethe 
*"New Ballads," London, 1897. 



diffused l^manticism in the V^Hneteenth Century. 265 

left behind him his "Gotz" and "Werther" period and 
widened out into larger utterance. Mr. Stedman speaks 
of the " Gothic feeling " in " The Lady of Shalott," and 
in ballads like "Oriana" and ''The Sisters," describing 
them as "work that in its kind is fully up to the best of 
those Pre-Raphaelites who, by some arrest of develop- 
ment, stop precisely where Tennyson made his second 
step forward, and censure him for having gone beyond 
them." * This estimate may be accepted so far as it 
concerns " The Lady of Shalott," which is known to have 
worked strongly upon Rossetti's imagination; but surely 
"The Sisters" and "Oriana" do not rank with the best 
Pre-Raphaelite work. The former is little better than a 
failure; and the latter, which provokes a comparison, not 
to Tennyson's advantage, with the fine old ballad, " Helen 
of Kirkconnell," is a weak thing. The name Oriana has 
romantic associations — it is that of the heroine of "Ama- 
dis de Gaul " — but the damnable iteration of it as a 
ballad burden is irritating, Medisval motifs are rather 
slightly handled in "The Golden Supper" (from the 
"Decameron," 4th novel, loth day); "The Beggar 
Maid " (from the ballad of " King Cophetua and the 
Beggar Maid " in the " Reliques ") ; and more adequately 
in " Godiva," a blank-verse rendering of the local legend 
of Coventry, in which an attempt is made to preserve 
something of the antique roughness under the smooth 
Vergilian elegance of Tennyson's diction. "The Day 
Dream " was a recasting of one of Perrault's fairy tales, 
" The Sleeping Beauty," under which title a portion of 
it had appeared in the "Poems Chiefly Lyrical " of 1830. 

♦"Victorian Poets." By E. C. Stedman. New York, 1886 
(tenth ed.), p. 155. 



366 i/l History of English '^Romanticism. 

Tennyson has written many greater poems than this, but 
few in which the special string of romance vibrates more 
purely. The tableau of the spellbound palace, with all 
its activities suspended, gave opportunity for the display 
of his unexampled pictorial power in scenes of still life; 
and the legend itself supplied that charmed isolation 
from the sphere of reality which we noticed as so impor- 
tant a part of the romantic poet's stock-in-trade in " Chris- 
tabel " and " The Eve of St. Agnes "— 

"The hall-door shuts again and all is still." 

Poems like " The Day Dream " and " The Princess " 
make it evident that Scott and Coleridge and Keats had 
so given back the Middle Ages to the imagination that 
any future poet, seeking free play in a realm unhampered 
by actual conditions — "apart from place, withholding 
time " — was apt to turn naturally, if not inevitably, to 
the feudal times. The action of " The Day Dream " 
proceeds no-where and no-when. The garden — if we 
cross-examine it — is a Renaissance garden : 

"Soft lustre bathes the range of urns 
On every slanting terrace-lawn : 
The fountain to its place returns, 
Deep in the garden lake withdrawn." 

The furnishings of the palace are a mixture of mediaeval 
and Louis Quatorze — clocks, peacocks, parrots, golden 
mantle pegs: — ■ 

"Till all the hundred summers pass, 

The beams that through the oriel shine 
Make prisms in every carven glass 
And beaker brimm'd with noble wine." 

But the impression, as a whole, is of the Middle Age of 



TXffused 'Romanticism in the zhQineteenth Century. 267 

poetic convention, if not of history; the enchanted date- 
less era of romance and fairy legend. 

*' St. Agnes " and *' Sir Galahad," its masculine coun- 
terpart, sound the old Catholic notes of saintly virginity 
and mystical, religious rapture, the Goitesmhme of me- 
dieeval hymnody. Not since Southwell's " Burning Babe " 
and Crashaw's " Saint Theresa " had any English poet 
given such expression to those fervid devotional moods 
which Sir Thomas Browne describes as " Christian anni- 
hilation, ecstasies, exolution, liquefaction, transforma- 
tion, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of God and in- 
gression into the divine shadow." This vein, we have 
noticed, is wanting in Scott. On the other hand, it may 
be noticed in passing, Tennyson's attitude towards nature 
is less exclusively romantic — in the narrow sense — than 
Scott's. He, too, is conscious of the historic associa- 
tions of place. In Tennyson, as in Scott, — 

"The splendour falls on castle walls 
And snowy summits old in story " * — 

but, in general, his treatment of landscape, in its human 

relations, is subtler and more intimate. 

" St. Agnes " and " Sir Galahad " are monologues, but 

lyric and not dramatic in Browning's manner. There is 

a dramatic falsity, indeed, in making Sir Galahad say of 

himself — 

"My strength is as the strength of ten 
Because my heart is pure," 

and the poem would be better in the third person. " St. 
Simeon Stylites" is a dramatic monologue more upon 

*This famous lyric, one of the " inserted " songs in "The 
Princess, " was inspired by the note of a bugle on the Lakes 
of Killarney. 



268 e// History of English ^Romanticism. 

Browning's model, i.e., a piece of apologetics and self- 
analysis. But in this province Tennyson is greatly 
Browning's inferior. 

"The Princess" (1847) ^^ representative of that 
" splendid composite of imagery," and that application 
of modern ideas to legendary material, or to invented 
material arbitrarily placed in an archaic setting, which 
are characteristic of this artist. The poem's sub-title is 
"A Medley," because it is 

" — made to suit with time and place, 
A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house, 
A talk of college and of ladies' rights, 
A feudal knight in silken masquerade, 
And, yonder, shrieks and strange experiments. " 

The problem is a modern one — the New Woman. No 
precise historic period is indicated. The female univer- 
sity is full of classic lore and art, but withal there are 
courts of feudal kings, with barons, knights, and squires, 
and shock of armoured champions in the lists. 

But the special service of Tennyson to romantic poetry 
lay in his being the first to give a worthy form to the 
great Arthurian saga; and the modern masterpiece of that 
poetry, all things considered, is his " Idylls of the 
King." Not so perfect and unique a thing as " The 
Ancient Mariner"; less freshly spontaneous, less stir- 
ringly alive than "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," Ten- 
nyson's Arthuriad has so much wider a range than Cole- 
ridge's ballad, and is sustained at so much higher a level 
than Scott's romance, that it outweighs them both in 
importance. The Arthurian cycle of legends, emerging 
from Welsh and Breton mythology; seized upon by 
French romancers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, 



Tfiffused Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century. 269 

who made of Arthur the pattern king, of Lancelot the 
pattern knight, and of the Table Round the ideal insti- 
tute of chivalry; gathering about itself accretions like 
the Grail Quest and the Tristram story; passing by trans- 
lation into many tongues, but retaining always its scene 
in Great or Lesser Britain, the lands of its origin, fur- 
nished the modern English romancer with a groundwork 
of national, though not Anglo-Saxon epic stuff, which cor- 
responds more nearly with the Charlemagne epos in 
France, and the Nibelung hero Saga in Germany, than 
anything else which our literature possesses. And a 
national possession, in a sense, it had always remained. 
The story in outline and in some of its main episodes 
was familiar. Arthur, Lancelot, Guinivere, Merlin, 
Modred, Iseult, Gawaine, were well-known figures, like 
Robin Hood or Guy of Warwick, in Shakspere's time as 
in Chaucer's. But the epos, as a whole, had never found 
its poet. Spenser had evaporated Arthur into allegory. 
Milton had dallied with the theme and put it by.* The 
Elizabethan drama, which went so far afield in search of 
the moving accident, had strangely missed its chance 
here, bringing the Round Table heroes upon its stage 
only in masque and pageant (Justice Shallow " was Sir 
Dagonet in Arthur's show "), or in some such perform- 
ance as the rude old Seneca tragedy of "The Misfortunes 
of Arthur." In 1695 Sir Richard Blackmore published 

*See vol. i., pp. 146-47. Dryden, like Milton, had designs 
upon Arthur. See introduction to the first canto of "Mar- 



mion 



" — Dryden, in immortal strain, 
Had raised the Table Round again, 
But that a ribald king and court 
Bade him toil on, to make them sport." 



270 (v^ History of English l^omanticism. 

his " Prince Arthur," an epic in ten books and in rimed 
couplets, enlarged in 1697 into "King Arthur" in twelve 
books. Blackmore professed to take Vergil as his model. 
A single passage from his poem will show how much 
chance the old chivalry tale had in the hands of a minor 
poet of King William's reign. Arthur and his company 
have landed on the shores of Albion, where 

"Rich wine of Burgundy and choice champagne 
Relieve the toil they suffered on the main ; 
But what more cheered them than their meats and wine, 
Was wise instruction and discourse divine 
From Godlike Arthur's mouth." 

There is no need, in taking a summary view of Tenny- 
son's " Idylls," to go into the question of sources, or to 
inquire whether Arthur was a historical chief of North 
Wales, or whether he signified the Great Bear (Arcturus) 
in Celtic mythology, and his Round Table the circle de- 
scribed by that constellation about the pole star.* Ten- 
nyson went no farther back for his authority than Sir 
Thomas Malory's " Morte Darthur," printed by Caxton 
in 1485, a compilation principally from old French 
Round Table romances. This was the final mediaeval 
shape of the story in English. It is somewhat wander- 
ing and prolix as to method, but written in delightful 
prose. The story of " Enid," however (under its various 
titles and arrangements in successive editions), he took 
from Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of the Welsh 
" Mabinogion " (1838-49). 

* For a discussion of these and similar matters and a bibli- 
ography of Arthurian literature, the reader should consult Dr. 
H. Oskar Sommer's scholarly reprint and critical edition of 
"Le Morte Darthur. By Syr Thomas Malory, " three vols., 
London, 1889-91. 



THffused l^omanticism in the Nineteenth Century. 2 7 1 

Before deciding upon the heroic blank verse and a 
loosely epic form, as most fitting for his purpose, Tenny- 
son had retold passages of Arthurian romance in the 
ballad manner and in various shapes of riming stanza. 
The first of these was "The Lady of Shalott" (1832), 
identical in subject with the later idyll of " Lancelot 
and Elaine," but fanciful and even allegorical in treat- 
ment. Shalott is from Ascalot, a variant of Astolat, in 
the old metrical romance — not Malory's — of the " Morte 
Arthur." The fairy lady, who sees all passing sights in 
her mirror and weaves them into her magic web, has been 
interpreted as a symbol of art, which has to do properly 
only with the reflection of life. When the figure of Lan- 
celot is cast upon the glass, a personal emotion is brought 
into her life which is fatal to her art. She is "sick of 
shadows," and looks through her window at the substance. 
Then her mirror cracks from side to side and the curse 
is come upon her. Other experiments of the same kind 
were " Sir Galahad " and " Sir Lancelot and Queen Gui- 
nivere" (both in 1842). The beauty of all these ballad 
beginnings is such that one is hardly reconciled to the 
loss of so much romantic music, even by the noble blank 
verse and the ampler narrative method which the poet 
finally adopted. They stand related to the "Idylls" 
very much as Morris' " Defence of Guenevere " stands to 
his "Earthly Paradise." 

Thoroughly romantic in content, the " Idylls of the 
King " are classical in form. They may be compared to 
Tasso's "Gierusalemme Liberata," in which the imper- 
fectly classical manner of the Renaissance is applied to 
a Gothic subject, the history of the Crusades. The first 
specimen given was the "Morte d'Arthur" of 1842, set 



272 <t/l History of English Romanticism. 

in a framework entitled "The Epic," in which "the poet, 
Everard Hall," reads to his friends a fragment from his 
epic, " King Arthur," in twelve books. All the rest he 
has burned. For — 

"Why take the style of those heroic times? 
For nature brings not back the Mastodon, 
Nor we those times ; and why should any man 
Remodel models? these twelve books of mine 
Were faint Homeric echoes." 

The " fragment " is thus put forward tentatively and 
with apologies — apologies which were little needed; for 
the "Morte d'Arthur," afterwards embedded in "The 
Passing of Arthur," remains probably the best, and cer- 
tainly the most Homeric passage in the " Idylls." Ten- 
nyson's own quality was more Vergilian than Homeric, 
but the models which he here remodels were the Ho- 
meric epics. He chose for his measure not the Spense- 
rian stanza, nor the ottava r'mia of Tasso, nor the octosyl- 
lables of Scott and the chivalry romances, but the heroic 
blank verse which Milton had fixed as the vehicle of Eng- 
lish classical epic. He adopts Homer's narrative prac- 
tices : the formulated repetitions of phrase, the pictorial 
comparisons, the conventional epithets (in moderation), 
and his gnomic habit — 

"O purblind race of miserable men," etc. 

The original four idylls were published in 1859.* 
Thenceforth the series grew by successive additions and 
rearrangements up to the completed "Idylls" of 1888, 
twelve in number — besides prologue and epilogue — ac- 

* Two of them, however, had been printed privately in 1857 
under the title of " Enid and Nimue " : the true and the false. 
"Nimue " was the first form of Vivien. 



'Diffused l^omanttctsm in the U^ineteentb Century. 273 

cording to the plan foreshadowed in " The Epic." The 
story of Arthur had thus occupied Tennyson for over a 
half century. Though modestly entitled "Idylls," by 
reason of the episodic treatment, the poem when finished 
was, in fact, an epic; but an epic that lacked the formal 
unity of the ".-^neid" and the "Paradise Lost," or even 
of the " Iliad." It resembled the Homeric heroic poems 
more than the literary epics of Vergil and Milton, in 
being not the result of a single act of construction, but 
a growth from the gradual fitting together of materials 
selected from a vast body of legend. This legendary 
matter he reduced to an epic unity. The adventures in 
Malory's romance are of very uneven value, and it 
abounds in inconsistencies and repetitions. He also re- 
distributed the ethical balance. Lancelot is the real 
hero of the old " Morte Darthur," and Guinivere— the 
Helen of romance — goes almost uncensured, Malory's 
Arthur is by no means " the blameless king " of Tenny- 
son, who makes of him a nineteenth-century ideal of 
royal knighthood, and finally an allegorical type of Soul 
at war with Sense. The downfall of the Round Table, 
that order of spiritual knight-errantry through which the 
king hopes to regenerate society, happens through the 
failure of his knights to rise to his own high level of 
character; in a degree, also, because the emprise is di- 
verted from attainable practical aims to the fantastic 
quest of the Holy Grail. The sin of Lancelot and the 
Queen, drawing after it the treachery of Modred, brings 
on the tragic catastrophe. This conception is latent in 
Malory, but it is central in Tennyson; and everywhere 
he subtilises, refines, elevates, and, in short, modernises 
the Motivirimg in the old story. Does he thereby also 



274 «^ History of English ^om antic ism. 

weaken it? Censure and praise have been freely be- 
stowed upon Tennyson's dealings with Malory. Thus it 
is complained that his Arthur is a prig, a curate, who 
preaches to his queen and lectures his court, and whose 
virtue is too conscious; that the harlot Vivien is a poor 
substitute for the damsel of the lake who puts Merlin to 
sleep under a great rock in the land of Benwick; that the 
gracious figure of Gawain suffers degradation from the 
application of an effeminate moral standard to his shin- 
ing exploits in love and war; that modern convenances 
are imposed upon a society in which they do not belong 
and whose joyous, robust naivete is hurt by them.* 

The allegorical method tried in " The Lady of Sha- 
lott," but abandoned in the earlier " Idlyls," creeps in 
again in the later; particularly in "Gareth and Lynette" 
(1872), in the elaborate symbolism of the gates of Came- 
lot, and in the guardians of the river passes, whom 
Gareth successively overcomes, and who seem to repre- 
sent the temptations incident to the different ages of 
man. The whole poem, indeed, has been interpreted in 
a parabolic sense, Merlin standing for the intellect, the 
Lady of the Lake for religion, etc. Allegory was a fa- 
vourite mediaeval mode, and the Grail legend contains an 
element of mysticism which invites an emblematic treat- 
ment. But the attraction of this fashion for minds of a 

* Matthew Arnold writes in one of his letters: "I have a 
strong sense of the irrationality of that period [the Middle 
Ages] and of the utter folly of those who take it seriously and 
play at restoring it ; still it has poetically the greatest charm 
and refreshment possible for me. The fault I find with Ten- 
nyson, in his 'Idylls of the King,' is that the peculiar charm 
of the Middle Age he does not give in them. There is some- 
thing magical about it, and I will do something with it before 
I have done," 



T)iffused %omanticism in the O^ineteenth Century. 275 

Platonic cast is dangerous to art: the temptation to find 
a meaning in human life more esoteric than any afforded 
by the literal life itself. A delicate balance must be 
kept between that presentation of the concrete which 
makes it significant by making it representative and typi- 
cal, and that other presentation which dissolves the in- 
dividual into the general, by making it a mere abstrac- 
tion. Were it not for Dante and Hawthorne and the second 
part of " Faust," one would incline to say that no crea- 
tive genius of the first order indulges in allegory. Homer 
is never allegorical except in the episode of Circe; 
Shakspere never, with the doubtful exception of "The 
Tempest." The allegory in the "Idylls of the King" is 
not of the obvious kind employed in the " Faery Queene " ; 
but Tennyson, no less than Spenser, appeared to feel that 
the simple retelling of an old chivalry tale, without im- 
parting to it some deeper meaning, was no work for a 
modern poet. 

Tennyson has made the Arthur Saga, as a whole, pe- 
culiarly his own. But others of the Victorian poets 
have handled detached portions of it. William Mor- 
ris' "Defence of Guenevere" (1858) anticipated the 
first group of " Idylls." Swinburne's " Tristram of 
Lyonesse" (1882) dealt at full length, and in a very dif- 
ferent spirit, with an epicyclic legend which Tennyson 
touched incidentally in "The Last Tournament." Mat- 
thew Arnold's "Tristram and Iseult" was a third manip- 
ulation of the legend, partly in dramatic, partly in narra- 
tive form, and in changing metres. It follows another 
version of Tristram's death, and the story of Vivian and 
Merlin which Iseult of Brittany tells her children is 
quite distinct from the one in the " Idylls." Iseult of 



m 



276 e/^ History of English 'Romanticism. 

Brittany — not Iseult of Cornwall — is the heroine of 
Arnold's poem. Thomas Westwood's " Quest of the 
Sancgreall " is still one more contribution to Arthurian 
poetry of which a mere mention must here suffice. 

For our review threatens to become a catalogue. To 
such a degree had mediaevalism become the fashion, that 
nearly every Georgian and Victorian poet of any preten- 
sions tried his hand at it. Robert Browning was not 
romantic in Scott's way, nor in Tennyson's. His busi- 
ness was with the soul. The picturesqueness of the ex- 
ternal conditions in which soul was placed was a matter 
of indifference. To-day was as good as yesterday. Now 
and then occurs a title with romantic implications — 
" Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," e.g.^ bor- 
rowed from a ballad snatch sung by the Fool in "Lear" 
(Roland is Roland of the " Chanson "). But the poem 
proves to be a weird study in landscape symbolism and 
the history of some dark emprise, the real nature of 
which is altogether undiscoverable. " Count Gismond," 
again, is the story of a combat in the lists at Aix in 
Provence, in which a knight vindicates a lady's honour 
with his lance, and slays her traducer at her feet. But 
this is a dramatic monologue like any other, and only 
accidentally mediaeval. "The Heretic's Tragedy: A 
Middle Age Interlude," is mediaeval without being ro- 
mantic. It recounts the burning, at Paris, a.d. 1314, of 
Jacques du Bourg-Molay, Grand Master of the Templars; 
and purports to be a sort of canticle, with solo and 
chorus, composed two centuries after the event by a 
Flemish canon of Ypres, to be sung at hocktide and fes- 
tivals. The childishness and devout buffoonery of an 
old miracle play are imitated here, as in Swinburne's 



^Diffused 'Romanticism in the U^ineteenth Century. 277 

"Masque of Queen Bersabe," This piece and "Holy 
Cross Day" are dramatic, or monodramatic, grotesques; 
and in their apprehension of this trait of the mediaeval 
mind are on a par with Hugo's " Pas d'armes du Roi 
Jean" and "La Chasse du Burgrave." But Browning's 
mousings in the Middle Ages after queer freaks of con- 
science or passion were occasional. If any historical 
period, more than another, had special interest for him, 
it was the period of the Italian Renaissance. Yet Ruskin 
said: "Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he 
writes of the Middle Ages." 

Among Mrs. Browning's poems, which, it needs hardly 
be said, are not prevailingly "Gothic," there are three 
interesting experiments in ballad romance: "The Ro- 
maunt of the Page," " The Lay of the Brown Rosary," 
and " The Rime of the Duchess May." In all of these 
she avails herself of the mediaeval atmosphere, simply to 
play variations on her favourite theme, the devotedness of 
woman's love. The motive is the same as in poems of 
modern life like "Bertha in the Lane" and "Aurora 
Leigh." The vehemence of this nobly gifted woman, 
her nervous and sometimes almost hysterical emotional- 
ism, are not without a disagreeable quality. With greater 
range and fervour, she had not the artistic poise of the 
Pre-Raphaelite poetess, Christina Rossetti. In these 
romances, as elsewhere, she is sometimes shrill and often 
mannerised. " The Romaunt of the Page " is the tale of 
a lady who attends her knight to the Holy Land, dis- 
guised as a page, and without his knowledge. She saves 
his life several times, and finally at the cost of her own. 
A prophetic accompaniment or burden comes in ever and 
anon in the distant chant of nuns over the dead abbess. 



278 t/J History of English Romanticism. 

"Beati ! beati mortui. " 
" The Lay of the Brown Rosary " is a charming but un- 
even piece, in four parts and a variety of measures, about 
a girl who, while awaiting her lover's return from the 
war, learns in a dream that she must die, and purchases 
seven years of life from the ghost of a wicked nun whose 
body has been immured in an old convent wall. The 
spirit gives the bride a brown rosary which she wears 
under her dress, but her kiss kills the bridegroom at the 
altar. The most spirited and well-sustained of these 
ballad poems is "The Rime of the Duchess May," in 
which the heroine rides off the battlements with her hus- 
band, " Toll slowly," runs the refrain. Mrs. Browning 
employs some archaisms, such as chapelle, chambere, ladle. 
The stories are seemingly of her own invention, and have 
not quite the genuine accent of folk-song. 

Even Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hood, representa- 
tives in their separate spheres of anti-romantic tenden- 
cies, made occasional forays into the Middle Ages. But 
who thinks of such things as "The Plea of the Midsum- 
mer Fairies " or " The Two Peacocks of Bedfont " when 
Hood is mentioned; and not rather of "The Bridge of 
Sighs " and " The Song of the Shirt " ? Or who, in spite 
of " Balder Dead " and " Tristram and Iseult," would 
classify Arnold's clean-cut, reserved, delicately intellec- 
tual work as romantic? Hood was an artist of the terri- 
ble as well as of the comic; witness his "Last Man," 
" Haunted House," and " Dream of Eugene Aram." If 
he could have welded the two moods into a more intimate 
union, and applied them to legendary material, he might 
have been a great artist in mediaeval grotesque — a spe- 
cies of Gothic Hoffman perhaps. As it is, his one ro- 



T) iff used %omantidsm in the V^ineteenth Century. 279 

mantic success is the charming lyric "Fair Ines." His 
longer poems in this kind, in modifications of ottava 
ri?na or Spenserian stanza, show Keats' influence very 
clearly. The imagery is profuse, but too distinct and 
without the xovl^^.\-iX.\c chiaroscuro. "The Water Lady" is 
a manifest imitation of "La Belle Dame sans Merci," 
and employs the same somewhat unusual stanza form. 
Hood — incorrigible punster — who had his jest at every- 
thing, jested at romance. He wrote ballad parodies — 
"The Knight and the Dragon," etc. — and an ironical 
" Lament for the Decline of Chivalry " : 

"Well hast thou cried, departed Burke, 
All chivalrous romantic work 

Is ended now and past ! 
That iron age — which some have thought 
Of mettle rather overwrought — 
Is now all overcast." 

And finally, "The Saint's Tragedy" (1848) of Charles 
Kingsley affords a case in which mediaeval biography is 
made the pretext for an assault upon mediseval ideas. It 
is a iendenz drama in five acts, founded upon the " Life 
of St. Elizabeth of Hungary," as narrated by her contem- 
porary, Dietrich the Thuringian. Its militant Protes- 
tantism is such as might be predicted from Kingsley's 
well-known resentment of the Romanist attitude towards 
marriage and celibacy; from his regard for freedom of 
thought; and from that distrust and contempt of Popish 
priestcraft which involved him in his controversy with 
Newman. "The Middle Age," says the Introduction, 
"was, in the gross, a coarse, barbarous, and profligate 
age. ... It was, in fact, the very ferocity and foulness 
of the time which, by a natural revulsion, called forth at 



28o ey/ History of English '^{omanticism. 

the same time the Apostolic holiness and the Manichean 
asceticism of the mediaeval saints. ... So rough and 
common a life-picture of the Middle Age will, I am 
afraid, whether faithful or not, be far from acceptable to 
those who take their notions of that period principally 
from such exquisite dreams as the fictions of Fouque, 
and of certain moderns whose graceful minds . . . are, 
on account of their very sweetness and simplicity, singu- 
larly unfitted to convey any true likeness of the coarse 
and stormy Middle Age. . , . But really, time enough 
has been lost in ignorant abuse of that period, and time 
enough also, lately, in blind adoration of it. When 
shall we learn to see it as it was ? " 

Polemic in its purpose and anti-Catholic in temper, 
"The Saint's Tragedy " then seeks to dispel the glamour 
which romance had thrown over mediiEval life. Kings- 
ley's Middle Age is not the holy Middle Age of the Ger- 
man " throne-and-altar '" men ; nor yet the picturesque 
Middle Age of Walter Scott. It is the cruel, ignorant, 
fanatical Middle Age of " The Amber Witch " and " The 
Succube." But Kingsley was too much of a poet not to 
feel those '" last enchantments " which whispered to 
Arnold from Oxford towers, maugre his " strong sense of 
the irrationality of that period." The saintly, as well 
as the human side, of Elizabeth's character is portrayed 
with sympathy, though poetically the best thing in the 
drama are the songs of the Crusaders. 

Kingsley, in effect, was always good at a ballad. His 
finest work in this kind is modern, "The Last Bucca- 
neer," "The Sands of Dee," "The Three Fishers," and 
the like. But there are the same fire and swing in many 
of his romantic ballads on historical or legendary sub- 



T>iffused 'Romanticism in the U^ineteenth Century. 28 1 

jects, such as "The Swan-Neck," "The Red King," 
"Ballad of Earl Haldan's Daughter," "The Song of the 
Little Baltung," and a dozen more. Without the imag- 
inative witchery of Coleridge, Keats, and Rossetti, in 
the ballad of action Kingsley ranks very close to Scott, 
The same manly delight in outdoor life and bold adven- 
ture, love of the old Teutonic freedom and strong feeling 
of English nationality inspire his historical romances, 
only one of which, however, "Hereward the Wake" 
(1866), has to do with the period of the Middle Ages. 



CHAPTER VII. 
Zbe presKapbaeUtee. 

In the latter half of the century the Italian Middle 
Age and Dante, its great exemplar, found new interpre- 
ters in the Rossetti family; a family well fitted by its 
mixture of bloods and its hereditary aptitudes, literary 
and artistic, to mediate between the English genius and 
whatever seemed to it alien or repellant in Dante's 
system of thought. The father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a 
political refugee, who held the professorship of Italian 
in King's College, London, from 183 1 to 1845, and was 
the author of a commentary on Dante which carried the 
politico-allegorical theory of the "Divine Comedy" to 
somewhat fantastic lengths. The mother was half Eng- 
lish and half Italian, a sister of Byron's travelling com- 
panion, Dr. Polidori. Of the four children of the mar- 
riage, Dante Gabriel and Christina became poets of 
distinction. The eldest sister, Maria Francesca, a relig- 
ious devotee who spent her last years as a member of a 
Protestant sisterhood, was the author of that unpretentious 
but helpful piece of Dante literature, " A Shadow of 
Dante." The younger brother, William Michael, is well 
known as a biographer, litterateur, and art critic, as an 
editor of Shelley and of the works of Dante Gabriel 
Rossetti. 

Other arts besides the literary art had partaken in the 



The Tre-'T{aphaelites. 283 

romantic movement. The eighteenth century had seen 
the introduction of the new, or English, school of land- 
scape gardening; and the premature beginnings of the 
Gothic revival in architecture, which reached a success- 
ful issue some century later.* Painting in France had 
been romanticised in the thirties pari passu with poetry 
and drama; and in Germany, Overbeck and Cornelius 
had founded a school of sacred art which corresponds, in 
its mediaeval spirit, to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 
In England painting was the last of the arts to catch the 
new inspiration. When the change came, it evinced that 
same blending of naturalism and Gothicism which de- 
fined the incipient romantic movement of the previous 
century. Painting, like landscape gardening, returned 
to nature; like architecture, it went back to the past. 
Like these, and like literature itself, it broke away from 
a tradition which was academic, if not precisely classic 
in the way in which David was classic. 

In 1848 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was estab- 
lished by three young painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 
John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt. The 
name expresses their admiration of the early Italian — 
and notably the early Florentine — religious painters, like 
Giotto, Ghiberti, Bellini, and Fra Angelica. In the work 
of these men they found a sweetness, depth, and sincerity 
of devotional feeling, a self-forgetfulness and humble 
adherence to truth, which were absent from the sophis- 
ticated art of Raphael and his successors. Even the 
imperfect command of technique in these "primitives" 
had a charm. The stiffness and awkwardness of their 

*See vol. i., chaps, iv. and vii., "The Landscape Poets" 
and "The Gothic Revival." 



284 <i/J History of English 'Romanticism. 

figure painting, their defects of drawing, perspective, and 
light and shade, their lack of anatomical science were like 
the lispingsof childhood or the artlessness of an old bal- 
lad. The immediate occasion of the founding of the 
Brotherhood was a book of engravings which Hunt and 
Rossetti saw at Millais' house, from the frescoes by Goz- 
zoli, Orcagna, and others in the Campo Santo, at Pisa ; the 
same frescoes, it will be remembered, which so strongly im- 
pressed Leigh Hunt and Keats. Holman Hunt — though 
apparently not his associates — had also read with eager ap- 
proval the first volume of Ruskin's " Modern Painters," in 
which the young artists of England are advised to "goto 
nature in all singleness of heart . . . rejecting nothing, 
selecting nothing," Pre-Raphaelitism was a practical, 
as " Modern Painters " was a theoretical, protest against 
the academic traditions which kept young artists making 
school copies of Raphael, instructed them that a third of 
the canvas should be occupied with a principal shadow, 
and that no two people's heads in the picture should be 
turned the same way, and asked, "Where are you going 
to put your brown tree ? " 

^ The three original members of the group associated 
with themselves four others : Thomas Woolner, the sculp- 
tor; James Collinson, a painter; F. G. Stephens, who 
began as an artist and ended as an art critic; and Ros- 
setti's brother William, who was the literary man of the 
movement. Woolner was likewise a poet, and contrib- 
uted to The Germ * his two striking pieces, " My Beau- 

*This was the organ of the Pre-Raphaelites, started in 
1850. Only four numbers were issued (January, February, 
March, April) , and in the third and fourth the title was 
changed to ^r/ and Poetry. The contents included, among 
other things, poems by Dante Gabriel and Christina Ros- 



7be Tre-%aphaelites. 285 

tiful Lady" and "Of My Lady in Death." Among other 
artists not formally enrolled in the Brotherhood, but who 
worked more or less in the spirit and principles of Pre- 
Raphaelitism, were Ford Madox Brown, an older man, in 
whose studio Rossetti had, at his own request, been ad- 
mitted as a student; Walter Deverell, who took Collin- 
son's place when the latter resigned his membership in 
order to study for the Roman Catholic priesthood; and 
Arthur Hughes.* 

iLBut the main importance of the Pre-Raphaelite move- 
ment to romantic literature resides in the poetry of Ros- 
setti, and in the inspiration which this communicated to 
younger men, like Morris and Swinburne, and through 
them to other and still younger followers. The history 
of English painting is no part of our subject, but Ros- 
setti's painting and his poetry so exactly reflect each 
other, that some definition or brief description of Pre- 
Raphaelitism seems here to be called for, ill qualified as 
I feel myself to give any authoritative account of the 
matter, f 

setti. One of the former's twelve contributions was "The 
Blessed Damozel." The 0.xford and Cambridge Magazine, 
which ran through the year 1856 and was edited by William 
Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, was also a Pre-Raphaelite 
journal and received many contributions from Rossetti. 

*The foreign strain in the English Pre-Raphaelites and in 
the painters and poets w'ho descend from them is worth not- 
ing. Rossetti was three-fourths Italian. Millais' parents 
were Channel Islanders — from Jersey — and he had two mother 
tongues, English and French. Burne-Jones is of Welsh blood, 
and Alma Tadema of Frisian birth. Among Neo-Pre-Ra- 
phaelite poets, the names of Theophile Marzials and Arthur 
O'Shaughnessy speak for themselves. 

f Let the reader consult the large and rapidly increasing 
literature on the English Pre-Raphaelites. I do not profess 
to be a very competent guide here, but I have found the fol- 
lowing works all in some degree enlightening. "Autobio- 



286 iA History of English 'Romanticism. 

•. 

And first as to methods : the Pre-Raphaelites rejected 
the academic system whereby the canvas was prepared 
by rubbing in bitumen, and the colours were laid upon a 
background of brown, grey, or neutral tints. Instead of 
this, they spread their colours directly upon the white, 
unprepared canvas, securing transparency by juxtaposi- 
tion rather than by overlaying. They painted their pic- 
tures bit by bit, as in frescoes or mosaic work, finishing 
each portion as they went along, until no part of the can- 
vas was left blank. The Pre-Raphaelite theory was 
sternly realistic. They were not to copy from the antique, 
but from nature. For landscape background, they were 
to take their easels out of doors. In figure painting they 
were to work, if possible, from a living model and not 
from a lay figure. A model once selected, it was to be 
painted as it was in each particular, and without imagi- 
native deviation. " Every Pre-Raphaelite landscape back- 
ground," wrote Ruskin, "is painted, to the last touch, in 
the open air from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelite 
figure, however studied in expression, is a true portrait 

graphical Notes of William Bell Scott," two vols., New 
York, 1892. "English Contemporary Art." Translated from 
the French of R. de la Sizeranne, Westminster, 1898. "D. 
G. Rossetti as Designer and Writer." W. M. Rossetti, Lon- 
don, 1889. "The Rossettis." E. L. Gary, New York, 1900. 
"Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement." Esther 
Wood, New York, 1894. "Pre-Raphaelitism." J. Ruskin, 
New York, i860. "The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." Hol- 
raan Hunt in Conietnporary Review, vol. xlix. (three articles). 
"Encyclopaedia Britannica, " article " Rossetti, " by Theodore 
Watts. Of course the standard lives and memoirs by William 
Rossetti, Hall Caine. William Sharp, and Joseph Knight, as 
well as Rossetti's "Family Letters," "Letters to William Al- 
lingham," etc., afford criticisms of the movement from various 
points of view. Lists of Rossetti's paintings and drawings are 
given by several of these authorities, with photographs or 
engravings of his most famous masterpieces. 



The Tre-%apbaelttes. 287 

of some living person. Every minute accessory is 
painted in the same manner." * In this fashion their 
earliest works were executed. In Rossetti's "Girlhood 
of Mary Virgin," exhibited in 1849, the figure of St. 
Anne is a portrait of the artist's mother; the Virgin, of 
his sister Christina; and Joseph, of a man-of-all-work 
employed in the family. In Millais' "Lorenzo and Isa- 
bella" — a subject from Keats — Isabella's brother, her 
lover, and one of the guests, are portraits of Deverell, 
Stephens, and the two Rossettis. But this severity of 
realism was not long maintained. It was a discipline, 
not a final method. Even in Rossetti's second painting, 
" Ecce Ancilla Domini," the faces of the Virgin and the 
angel Gabriel are blendings of several models; although, 
in its freedom from convention, its austere simplicity, 
and endeavour to see the fact as it happened, the piece 
is in the purest Pre-Raphaelite spirit. Ruskin insisted 
that, while composition was necessarily an affair of the 
imagination, the figures and accessories of a picture 
should be copies from the life. In the early days of the 
Brotherhood there was an ostentatious conscientiousness 
in observing this rule. We hear a great deal in Ros- 
setti's correspondence about the brick wall at Chiswick 
which he copied into his picture " Found," and about his 
anxious search for a white calf for the countryman's cart 
in the same composition. But all the Pre-Raphaelites 
painted from the lay figure as well as from the living 
model, and Rossetti, in particular, relied quite as much 
on memory and imagination as upon the object before 
him. W. B. Scott thinks that his most charming works 

*" Lectures on Architecture and Painting." Delivered at 
Edinburgh in 1853. Lecture iv., "Pre-Raphaelitism." 



288 <iA History of English 'Romanticism. 

were the small water-colours on Arthurian subjects, 
"done entirely without nature and a good deal in the 
spirit of illuminated manuscripts, with very indifferent 
drawing and perspective nowhere." As for Millais, he 
soon departed from rigidly Pre-Raphaelite principles, and 
became the most successful and popular of British artists 
in genre. In natural talent and cleverness of execution 
he was the most brilliant of the three; in imaginative 
intensity and originality he was Rossetti's inferior — as 
in patience and religious earnestness he was inferior to 
Hunt. It was Hunt who stuck most faithfully to the 
programme of Pre-Raphaelitism. He spent laborious 
years in the East in order to secure the exactest local 
truth of scenery and costume for his Biblical pieces: 
" Christ in the Shadow of Death," " Christ in the Tem- 
ple," and " The Scapegoat." While executing the last- 
named, he pitched his tent on the shores of the Dead Sea 
and painted the desert landscape and the actual goat from 
a model tied down on the edge of the sea. Hunt's 
" Light of the World " was one of the masterpieces of the 
school, and as it is typical in many ways, may repay de- 
scription. Ruskin pronounced it "the most perfect in- 
stance of expressional purpose with technical power which 
the world has yet produced." 

In this tall, narrow canvas the figure of Christ occupies 
nearly half the space. He holds a lantern in his hand 
and knocks at a cottage door. The face — said to be a 
portrait of Venables, curate of St. Paul's, Oxford — is 
quite unlike the type which Raphael has made traditional. 
It is masculine — even rugged — seamed with lines of care, 
and filled with an expression of yearning. There is 
anxiety and almost timidity in his pose as he listens for 



The 'Pre-%aphaelites. 289 

an answer to his knock. The nails and bolts of the door 
are rusted; it is overgrown with ivy and the tall stalks 
and flat umbels of fennel. The sill is choked with net- 
tles and other weeds, emblems all of the long sleep of 
the world which Christ comes to break. The full moon 
makes a halo behind his head and shines through the 
low boughs of an orchard, whose apples strew the dark 
grass in the foreground, sown with spots of light from the 
star-shaped perforations in the lantern-cover. They are 
the apples of Eden, emblems of the Fall. Everything, 
in fact, is symbolical. Christ's seamless white robe, 
with its single heavy fold, typifies the Church (catholic; 
the jewelled clasps of the priestly mantle, one square and 
one oval, are the Old and New Testaments. The golden 
crown is enwoven with one of thorns, from which new 
leaves are sprouting. The richly embroidered mantle 
hem has its meaning, and so have the figures on the lan- 
tern. To get the light in this picture right. Hunt painted 
out of doors in an orchard every moonlight night for 
three months from nine o'clock till five. While working 
in his studio, he darkened one end of the room, put a 
lantern in the hand of his lay-figure and painted this 
interior through the hole in a curtain. On moonlight 
nights he let the moon shine in through the window to 
mix with the lantern light. It was a principle with the 
Brotherhood that detail, though not introduced for its 
own sake, should be painted with truth to nature. Hunt, 
especially, took infinite pains to secure minute exactness 
in his detail, Ruskin wrote in enthusiastic praise of 
the colours of the gems on the mantle clasp in " The 
Light of the World," and said that all the Academy 
critics and painters together could not have executed one 



290 ii/1 History of English Romanticism. 

of the nettle leaves at the bottom of the picture. The 
lizards in the foreground of Millais' " Ferdinand Lured 
by Ariel" (exhibited in 1850) were studied from life; 
and Scott makes merry over the shavings on the floor of 
the carpenter shop in the same artist's " Christ in the 
House of his Parents," a composition which was fero- 
ciously ridiculed by Dickens in " Household Words." 

The symbolism which is so pronounced a feature in 
" The Light of the World " is common to all the Pre- 
Raphaelite art. It is a mediaeval note, and Rossetti 
learned it from Dante. Symbolism runs through the 
" Divine Comedy " in such touches as the rush, emblem 
of humility, with which Vergil girds Dante for his jour- 
ney through Purgatory; the constellation of four stars — 

"Non viste mai fuor ch' alia prima gente " — 

typifying the cardinal virtues ; the three different coloured 
steps to the door of Purgatory; * and thickening into the 
elaborate apocalyptic allegory of the griffin and the car 
of the church, the eagle and the mystic tree in the last 
cantos of the " Purgatorio." In Hunt's "Christ in the 
Shadow of Death," the young carpenter's son is stretch- 
ing his arms after work, and his shadow, thrown upon 
the wall, is a prophecy of the crucifixion. In Millais' 
"Christ in the House of his Parents," the boy has 
wounded the palm of his hand upon a nail, another 
foretokening of the crucifixion. In Rossetti's "Girlhood 
of Mary Virgin," Joseph is training a vine along a piece 
of trellis in the shape of the cross; Mary is copying in 
embroidery a three-flowered white lily plant, growing in 
a flower-pot which stands upon a pile of books lettered 

*CJ. Milton -. " Each stair mysteriously was meant " (" P. L."). 



The Tre-'T{aphaelites. 291 

with the names of the cardinal virtues. The quaint 
little child angel who tends the plant is a portrait of a 
young sister of Thomas Woolner. Similarly, in *' Ecce 
Ancilla Domini, ' the lily of the annunciation which 
Gabriel holds is repeated in the piece of needlework 
stretched upon the 'broidery frame at the foot of Mary's 
bed. In " Beata Beatrix " the white poppy brought by 
the dove is the symbol at once of chastity and of death ; 
and the shadow upon the sun-dial marks the hour of 
Beatrice's beatification. Again, in " Dante's Dream," 
poppies strew the floor, emblems of sleep and death ; an 
expiring lamp symbolises the extinction of life; and a 
white cloud borne away by angels is Beatrice's departing 
soul. Love stands by the couch in fiame-coloured robes, 
fastened at the shoulder with the scallop shell which is 
the badge of pilgrimage. In Millais" " Lorenzo and Isa- . 
bella " the salt-box is overturned upon the table, signify- 
ing that peace is broken between Isabella's brothers and 
their table companion. Doves are everywhere in Ros- 
setti's pictures, embodiments of the Holy Ghost and the 
ministries of the spirit. Rossetti labelled his early man- 
uscript poems "Poems of the Art Catholic"; and the 
Pre-Raphaelite heresy was connected by unfriendly critics 
with the Anglo-Catholic or Tractarian movement at Ox- 
ford. William Sharp, in speaking of "that splendid 
outburst of Romanticism in which Coleridge was the first 
and most potent participant," and of the lapse or ebb 
that followed the death of Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and 
Keats, resumes : " At last a time came when a thrill of 
expectation, of new desire, of hope, passed through the 
higher lives of the nation; and what followed thereafter 
were the Oxford movement in the Church of England, 



292 ^ History of English %omanticism. 

the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art, and the far-reaching 
Gothic revival. Different as these movements were in 
their primary aims, and still more differing in the indi- 
vidual representations of interpreters, they were in reality 
closely interwoven, one being the outcome of the other. 
The study of medieval art, which was fraught with such 
important results, was the outcome of the widespread 
ecclesiastical revival, which in its turn was the outcome 
of the Tractarian movement in Oxford. The influence 
of Pugin was potent in strengthening the new impulse, 
and to him succeeded Ruskin with 'Modern Painters' 
and Newman with the ' Tracts for the Times.' Primar- 
ily the Pre-Raphaelite movement had its impulse in the 
Oxford religious revival; and however strange it may 
seem to say that such men as Holman Hunt and Rossetti 
. . . followed directly in the footsteps of Newman and 
Pusey and Keble, it is indubitably so." * Ruskin, too, 
cautioned his young friends that " if their sympathies 
with the early artists lead them into mediaevalism or Ro- 
manism, they will of course come to nothing. But I be- 
lieve there is no danger of this, at least for the strongest 
among them. There may be some weak ones whom the 
Tractarian heresies may touch ; but if so, they will drop 
off like decayed branches from a strong stem." f One 
of these weak ones who dropped off was James Collinson, 
a man of an ascetic and mystical piety — like Werner or 
Brentano. He painted, among other things, "The Re- 
nunciation of St. Elizabeth " from Kingsley's "Saint's 
Tragedy." " The picture," writes Scott, " resembled the 

*" Dante Gabriel Rossetti: a record and a study," Lon- 
don, 1882, pp. 40-41. 
f "Pre-Raphaelitism," p. 23, note. 



The 'Pre-'T(apbaelites. 293 

feckless dilettanteism of the converts who were then 
dropping out of their places in Oxford and Cambridge 
into Mariolatry and Jesuitism, In fact, this James Col- 
linson actually did become Romanist, wanted to be a 
priest, painted no more, but entered a seminary, where 
they set him to clean the boots as an apprenticeship in hu- 
mility and obedience. They did not want him as a priest ; 
they were already getting tired of that species of convert; 
so he left, turned to painting again, and disappeared." * 

M. de la Sizeranne is rather scornful of these metaphys- 
ical definitions of Pre-Raphaelitism ; " for to characterise 
a Pre-Raphaelite picture by saying that it was inspired 
by the Oxford movement, is like attempting to explain 
the mechanism of a lock by describing the political opin- 
ions of the locksmith." f He himself proposes, as the 
distinguishing characteristics of Pre-Raphaelite art, orig- 
inality of gesture and vividness of colouring. This is 
the professional point of view; but the student of litera- 
ture is less concerned with such technical aspects of the 
subject than with those spiritual aspects which connect the 
work of the Pre-Raphaelites with the great mediaeval or 
romantic revival. 

When Ruskin came to the rescue of the P.-R. B. in 
185 1, in those letters to the Times, afterwards reprinted 
in pamphlet form under the title " Pre-Raphaelitism," 
he recognised the propriety of the name, and the real 
affinity between the new school and the early Italian 
schools of sacred art. Mediaeval art, he asserted, J was 



*" Autobiographical Notes of William Bell Scott," vol. i. ,p. 
281. 
f " English Contemporary Art, " p. 58. 
} " Lectures on Architecture and Painting," 1S53. 



294 -^ History of English 'T{omanticism. 

religious and truthful ; modern art is profane and insin- 
cere. " In mediaeval art, thought is the first thing, exe- 
cution is the second; in modern art, execution is the 
first thing and thought is the second. And again, in 
mediaeval art, truth is first, beauty second; in modern 
art, beauty is first, truth second." Ruskin denied that 
the Pre-Raphaelites were unimaginative, though he al- 
lowed that they had a disgust for popular forms of grace 
and prettiness. And he pointed out a danger in the fact 
that their principles confined them to foreground work, 
and called for laborious finish on a small scale. In 
" Modern Painters " he complained that the Pre-Raphael- 
ites should waste a whole summer in painting a bit of 
oak hedge or a bed of weeds by a duck pond, which caught 
their fancy perhaps by reminding them of a stanza in 
Tennyson. Nettles and mushrooms, he said, were good 
to make nettle soup and fish sauce ; but it was too bad 
that the nobler aspects of nature, such as the banks of 
the castled Rhine, should be left to the frontispieces 
in the Annuals. Ruskin, furthermore, denied that the 
drawing of the Pre-Raphaelites was bad or their perspec- 
tive false; or that they imitated \h& errors oi the early 
Florentine painters, whom they greatly excelled in tech- 
nical accomplishment. Meanwhile be it remarked that 
the originality of gesture in Pre-Raphaelite figure paint- 
ing, which M. de la Sizeranne notices, was only one 
more manifestation of the romantic desire for individu- 
ality and concreteness as against the generalising aca- 
demicism of the eighteenth century.* 

As poets, the Pre-Raphaelites derive from Keats rather 
than from Scott, in their exclusive devotion to beauty, to 
*See vol. i., p. 44. 



The Tre-l^phaeliies. 295 

art for art's sake; in their single absorption in the pas- 
sion of love; and in their attraction towards the more 
esoteric side of mediaeval life, rather than towards its 
broad, public, and military aspects.* 

Rossetti's position in the romantic literature of the 
last half of the ninetenth century is something like Cole- 
ridge's in the first half. Unlike Coleridge, he was the 
leader of a school, the master of a definite group of art- 
ists and poets. His actual performance, too, far exceeds 

*"The return of this school was to a mediaevalism different 
from the tentative and scrappy medisevalism of Percy, from 
the genial but slightly superficial medisevalism of Scott, and 
even from the more exact but narrow and distinctly conven- 
tional mediaevalism of Tennyson. . . . Moreover, though it 
may seem whimsical or extravagant to say so, these poets 
added to the very charm of mediaeval literature, which they 
thus revived, a subtle something which differentiates it from 
— which, to our perhaps blind sight, seems to be wanting in 
— mediaeval literature itself. It is constantly complained (and 
some of those who cannot go all the way with the complainants 
can see what they mean) that the graceful and labyrinthine 
stories, the sweet snatches of song, the quaint drama and leg- 
end of the Middle Ages lack — to us — life ; that they are shad- 
owy, unreal, tapestry on the wall, not alive even as hving 
pageants are. By the strong touch of modernness which 
these poets and the best of their followers introduced into 
their work, they have given the vivification required " (Saints- 
bury, " Literature of the Nineteenth Century, " p. 439) . Pre- 
Raphaelitism "is a direct and legitimate development of the 
great romantic revival in England. . . . Even Tennyson, 
much more Scott and Coleridge and their generation, had 
entered only very partially into the treasures of mediaeval 
literature, and were hardly at all acquainted with those of 
mediaeval art. Conybeare, Kemble, Thorpe, Madden were 
only in Tennyson's own time reviving the study of Old and 
Middle English. Early French and Early Italian were but 
just being opened up. Above all, the O.xford Movement di- 
rected attention to mediaeval architecture, literature, thought, 
as had never been the case before in England, and as has 
never been the case at all in any other country" ("A Short 
History of English Literature," by G. Saintsbury, London, 
1898, p. 779). 



296 i/1 History of English %omanticism. 

Coleridge's in amount, if not in value. But like Cole- 
ridge, he was a seminal mind, a mind rich in original 
suggestions, which inspired and influenced younger men 
to carry out its ideas, often with a fluency of utterance 
and a technical dexterity both in art and letters which 
the master himself did not possess. Holman Hunt, 
Millais, and Burne-Jones among painters, Morris and 
Swinburne among poets, were disciples of Rossetti who 
in some ways outdid him in execution. His pictures 
were rarely exhibited, and no collection of his poems was 
published till 1870, Meanwhile, however, many of these 
had circulated in manuscript, and " secured a celebrity 
akin in kind and almost equal in extent to that enjoyed 
by Coleridge's ' Christabel ' during the many years pre- 
. ceding 1816 in which it lay in manuscript. Like Cole- 
ridge's poem in another important particular, certain of 
Rossetti's ballads, while still unknown to the public, so 
far influenced contemporary poetry that when they did 
at length appear, they had all the seeming to the unini- 
tiated of work imitated from contemporary models, in- 
stead of being, as in fact they were, the primary source 
of inspiration for writers whose names were earlier estab- 
lished." * William Morris, e.g., had printed four vol- 
umes of verse in advance of Rossetti ; and the earliest 
of these, " The Defence of Guenevere," which contains 
his most intensely Pre-Raphaelite work and that most 
evidently done in the spirit of Rossetti's teachings, saw 
the light (1858) twelve years before Rossetti's own. 
Swinburne, too, had published three volumes of poetry 
before 1870, including the "Poems and Ballads" of 

♦"Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti," by T. Hall 
Caine, London, 1S82, p. 41. 



The Tre-%aphaelites. 297 

1866, in which Rossetti's influence is plainly manifest; 
and he had already secured a wide fame at a time when 
the elder poet's reputation was still esoteric and mainly 
confined to the chiacle. William M. Rossetti, in describ- 
ing the literary influences which moulded his brother's 
tastes, tells us that " in the long run he perhaps enjoyed 
and revered Coleridge beyond any other modern poet 
whatsoever." * 

It is worth while to trace these literary influences t 
with some detail, since they serve to link the nec- 
romantic poetry of our own time to the product of that 
older generation which had passed away before Ros- 
setti came of age. It is interesting to find then, that at 
the age of fifteen (1843) he taught himself enough Ger- 
man to enable him to translate Burger's " Lenore," as 
Walter Scott had done a half-century before. This devil 
of a poem so haunts our history that it has become as 
familiar a spirit as Mrs. Radcliffe's bugaboo appari- 
tions, and our flesh refuses any longer to creep at it. It 
is quite one of the family. It would seem, indeed, as if 
Burger's ballad was set as a school copy for every young 
romanticist in turn to try his 'prentice hand upon. 
Fortunately, Rossetti's translation has perished, as has 
also his version — some hundred lines — of the earlier por- 
tion of the " Nibelungenlied." But a translation which 
he made about the same time of the old Swabian poet, 
Hartmann von Aue's " Der Arme Heinrich " (Henry the 
Leper) is preserved, and was first published in 1886. 
This poem, it will be remembered, was the basis of 
Longfellow's "Golden Legend" (185 1). Rossetti did 

♦"The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti." Ed- 
ited by W. M. Rossetti, two vols., London, i886. 



298 <iA History of English ^{omanticism . 

not keep up his German, and in later years he never had 
much liking for Scandinavian or Teutonic literature. 
He was a Latin, and he made it his special task to inter- 
pret to modern Protestant England whatever struck him 
as most spiritually intense and characteristic in the 
Latin Catholic Middle Age. The only Italian poet 
whom he "earnestly loved" was Dante. He did not 
greatly care for Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Tasso 
— the Renaissance poets — though in boyhood he had 
taken delight in Ariosto, just as he had in Scott and 
Byron. But that was a stage through which he passed ; 
none of these had any ultimate share in Rossetti's cul- 
ture. At fifteen he wrote a ballad entitled " Sir Hugh 
the Heron," founded on a tale of Allan Cunningham, 
but taking its name and motto from the lines in " Mar- 

mion " — 

"Sir Hugh the Heron bold. 
Baron of Twisell and of Ford, 
And Captain of the Hold." 

A few copies of this were printed for family circula- 
tion by his fond grandfather, G, Polidori. Among 
French writers he had no modern favourites beyond 
Hugo, Musset, and Dumas. But like all the neo-roman- 
ticists, he was strongly attracted by Francois Villon, that 
strange Parisian poet, thief, and murderer of the fifteenth 
century. He made three translations from Villon, the 
best known of which is the famous " Ballad of Dead 
Ladies " with its felicitous rendering of the refrain — 

"But where are the snows of yester year? " 
(Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?) 

There are at least three good English verse renderings 
of this ballad of Villon; one by Andrew Lang; one by 



The Tre-%apbaelites. 299 

John Payne, and doubtless innumerable others, unknown 
to me or forgotten. In fact, every on^ translates it now- 
adays, as every one used to translate Burger's ballad. 
It is the " Lenore " of the neo-romanticists. Rossetti 
was a most accomplished translator, and his version of 
Dante's "Vita Nuova" and of the "Early Italian Poets" 
(1861) — reissued as " Dante and His Circle" (1874) — is 
a notable example of his skill. There are two other 
specimens of old French minstrelsy, and two songs from 
Victor Hugo's " Burgraves " among his miscellaneous 
translations; and William Sharp testifies that Rossetti 
at one time thought of doing for the early poetry of 
France what he had already done for that of Italy, but 
never found the leisure for it.* Rossetti had no knowl- 
edge of Greek, and " the only classical poet," says his 
brother, " whom he took to in any degree worth speaking 
of was Homer, the ' Odyssey ' considerably more than 
the ' Iliad.' " This, I presume, he knew only in transla- 
tion, but the preference is significant, since, as we have v 
seen, the " Odyssey " is the most romantic of epics. 
Among English poets, he preferred Keats to Shelley, as 
might have been expected. Shelley was a visionary and 
Keats was an artist; Shelley often abstract, Keats always 
concrete. Shelley had a philosophy, or thought he had; 
Keats had none, neither had Rossetti, It is quite com- 
prehensible that the sensuous element in Keats would 
attract a born colourist like Rossetti beyond anything 
in the English poetry of that generation; and I need not 
repeat that the latest Gothic or romantic schools have all 
been taking Keats' direction rather than Scott's, or even 
than Coleridge's. Rossetti's work, I should say, e.g., 
* " Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A Record and a Study," p. 305. 



300 cA History of English Romanticism. 

in such a piece as " The Bride's Prelude," is a good deal 
more like "Isabella" and "The Eve of St. Agnes" than 
it is like "The Ancient Mariner" or "Christabel" or 
"The Lay of the Last Minstrel." Rossetti got little 
from Milton and Dryden, or even from Chaucer and 
Spenser. Wordsworth he valued hardly at all. In the 
last two or three years of his life he came to have an 
exaggerated admiration for Chatterton. Rossetti's taste, 
like his temperament, was tinctured with morbidness. 
He sought the intense, the individual, the symbolic, the 
mystical. These qualities he found in a supreme degree 
in Dante. Probably it was only his austere artistic con- 
science which saved him from the fantastic — the merely 
peculiar or odd — and kept him from going astray after 
false gods like Poe and Baudelaire. Chaucer was a 
mediaeval poet and Spenser certainly a romantic one, but 
their work was too broad, too general in its appeal, too 
healthy, one might almost say, to come home to Ros- 
setti.* William Rossetti testifies that " any writing 

* He wrote to Allingham in 1855, apropos of the latter's 
poem "The Music Master" : "I'm not sure that it is not too 
noble or too resolutely healthy. ... I must confess to a need 
in narrative dramatic poetry ... of something rather 'excit- 
ing, ' and indeed, I believe, something of the 'romantic ' ele- 
ment, to rouse my mind to anything like the moods produced 
by personal emotion in my own life. That sentence is shock- 
ingly ill worded, but Keats' narratives would be of the kind I 
mean." Theodore Watts ("Encyclopaedia Britannica, " arti- 
cle "Rossetti ") says that "the purely romantic temper was 
with Rossetti a more permanent and even a more natural tem- 
per than with any other nineteenth-century poet, even includ- 
ing the author of ' Christabel ' himself. " He thinks that all the 
French romanticists together do not equal the romantic feel- 
ing in a single picture of Rossetti's ; and he somewhat capri- 
ciously defines the idea at the core of romanticism as that of 
the evil forces of nature assailing man through his sense of 
beauty. Analysis run mad ! As to Poe, Rossetti certainly 



The Tre-%aphaelites. 301 

about devils, spectres, or the supernatural generally . . . 
had always a fascination for him." Sharp remarks that 
work more opposite than Rossetti's to the Greek spirit 
can hardly be imagined, " The former [the Greek spirit] 
looked to light, clearness, form in painting, sculpture, 
architecture; to intellectual conciseness and definiteness 
in poetry; the latter [Rossetti] looked mainly to diffused 
colour, gradated to almost indefinite shades in his art, 
finding the harmonies thereof more akin than severity of 
outline and clearness of form ; while in his poetry the 
Gothic love of the supernatural, the Gothic delight in 
sensuous images, the Gothic instinct of indefiniteness 
and elaboration, carried to an extreme, prevailed. . . . 
He would take more pleasure in a design by . , , Wil- 
liam Blake . . . than in the more strictly artistic draw- 
ing of some revered classicist; more enjoyment in the 
weird or dramatic Scottish ballad than in Pindaric or 
Horatian ode ; and he would certainly rather have had 
Shakspere than ^schylus, Sophocles, and Euripides put 
together." 

Rossetti's office in the later and further development 
of romantic art was threefold : First, to revive and ex- 
press, both in painting and poetry, the religious spirit of 
the early Florentine schools; secondly, to give a more 
intimate interpretation of Dante to the English public, 
and especially of Dante's life and personality and of his 



preferred him to Wordsworth. Hall Caine testifies that he 
used to repeat "Ulalume" and "The Raven" from memory; 
and that the latter suggested his "Blessed Damozel." "I 
saw that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with 
the grief of the lover on earth, and so I determined to reverse 
the conditions, and give utterance to the yearning of the loved 
one in heaven" ("Recollections," p. 284). 



302 cA History of English T^omanticism. 

minor poetry, like the "Vita Nuova," which had not yet 
been translated; thirdly, to afford new illustrations of 
mediaeval life and thought, partly by treating legendary 
matter in the popular ballad form, and partly by treating 
romantic matter of his own invention with the rich colour 
and sensuous imagery which belonged to his pictorial 
art. 

" Perhaps," writes Mr. Caine,* " Catholicism is itself 
essentially mediagval, and perhaps a man cannot possibly 
be a * mediaeval artist, heart and soul,' without partaking 
of a strong religious feeling that is primarily Catholic — 
so much were the religion and art of the Middle Ages 
knit each to each, . . . Rossetti's attitude towards spirit- 
ual things was exactly the reverse of what we call Protes- 
tant. . , . He constantly impressed me during the last 
days of his life with the conviction that he was by relig- 
ious bias of nature a monk of the Middle Ages." All 
this is true in a way, yet Rossetti strikes one as being 
Catholic, without being religious; as mediaeval rather 
than Christian. He was agnostic in his belief and not 
devout in his practice; so that the wish that he suddenly 
expressed in his last illness, to confess himself to a 
priest, affected his friends as a singular caprice. It was 
the romantic quality in the Italian sacred art of the Mid- 
dle Ages that attracted him; and it attracted him as a 
poet and painter, not as a devotee. There was little in 
Rossetti of the mystical and ascetic piety of Novalis or 
Zacharias Werner; nor of the steady religious devotion 
of his friend Holman Hunt, or his own sister Christina. 

Rossetti, by the way, was never in Italy, though he made 
several visits to France and Belgium. A glance at the 
*" Recollections," p. 140. 



The Tre-l^aphaelites. 303 

list of his designs — extending to some four hundred 
titles — in oil, water-colour, crayon, pen and ink, etc., 
will show how impartially his interest was distributed 
over the threefold province mentioned above. There 
are sacred pieces like " Mary Magdalen at the Door of 
Simon the Pharisee," " St. Cecily," a " Head of Christ," 
a "Triptych for Llandaflf Cathedral"; Dante subjects 
such as " Paolo and Francesca," " Beata Beatrix," " La 
Donna della Finestra," "Giotto Painting the Portrait 
of Dante " ; and, in greater number, compositions of a 
purely romantic nature — " Fair Rosamond," " La Belle 
Dame sans Merci," "The Chapel before the Lists," 
"Michael Scott's Wooing," "Meeting of Sir Tristram 
and Yseult," "Lady Lilith," "The Damozel of the 
Sanct Grail," " Death of Breuse sans Pitie," and the like. 
It will be noticed that some of these subjects are taken 
from the Round Table romances. Tennyson was partly 
responsible for the newly awakened interest in the 
Arthurian legend, but the purely romantic manner which 
he had abandoned in advancing from " Sir Galahad " and 
"The Lady of Shalott" to the " Morte d' Arthur " of 1842 
and the first "Idylls" of 1859, continued to characterise 
the work of the Pre-Raphaelites both in poetry and in 
painting. Malory's " Morte Darthur " was one of Ros- 
setti's favourite books, and he preferred it to Tennyson, 
as containing "the ze^^/r<f element in its perfection. . . . 
Tennyson Aas it certainly here and there in imagery, but 
there is no great success in the part it plays through his 
' Idylls.' " * The five wood-engravings from designs fur- 
nished by Rossetti for the Moxon Tennyson quarto of 
1857 include three Arthurian subjects: "The Lady of 
*Caine's "Recollections," p. 266. 



304 <iA History of English %omanticism. 

Shalott," "King Arthur Sleeping in Avalon," and "Sir 
Galahad Praying in the Wood-Chapel." " Interwoven 
as were the Romantic revival and the esthetic move- 
ment," writes Mr. Sharp, " it could hardly have been 
otherwise but that the young painter-poet should be 
strongly attracted to that Arthurian epoch, the legendary 
glamour of which has since made itself so widely felt in 
the Arthurian idyls of the laureate, . . . Mr. Ruskin 
speaks, in his lecture on ' The Relation of Art to Relig- 
ion ' delivered in Oxford, of our indebtedness to Ros- 
setti as the painter to whose genius we owe the revival 
of interest in the cycle of early English legend." 

It was in 1857 that Rossetti, whose acquaintance had 
been recently sought by three young Oxford scholars, 
Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and Algernon 
Charles Swinburne, volunteered to surround the gallery of 
the new Union Club House at Oxford with life-size fres- 
coes from the " Morte Darthur." * He was assisted in 
this work by a number of enthusiastic disciples. Burne- 
Jones had already done some cartoons in colour for 
stained glass, and Morris had painted a subject from the 
"Morte Darthur," to wit: "Sir Tristram after his Ill- 
ness, in the Garden of King Mark's Palace, recognised 
by the Dog he had given to Iseult." Rossetti's con- 
tribution to the Oxford decorations was " Sir Lancelot 
before the Shrine of the Sangreal." Morris' was " Sir 
Palomides' Jealousy of Sir Tristram and Iseult," an inci- 

* Burne-Jones had been attracted by Rossetti's illustration 
of Allingham's poem, "The Maids of Elfinmere," and had 
obtained an introduction to him at London in 1856. It was 
by Rossetti's persuasion that he gave up the church for the 
career of an artist. Rossetti and Swinburne some years later 
(1862) became housemates for a time at Chelsea ; and Rossetti 
and Morris for a number of years, off and on, at Kelmscott. 



The Tre-I^phaelites. 305 

dent which he also treated in his poetry. Burne-Jones, 
Valentine Prinsep, J, H. Pollen, and Arthur Hughes 
likewise contributed. Scott says that these paintings 
were interesting as designs; that they were "poems more 
than pictures, being large illuminations and treated in a 
mediaeval manner." But he adds that not one of the 
band knew anything about wall painting. They laid 
their water-colours, not on a plastered surface, but on a 
rough brick wall, merely whitewashed. They used no 
adhesive medium, and in a few months the colours peeled 
off and the whole series became invisible. 

A co-partnership in subjects, a duplication of treat- 
ment, or interchange between the arts of poetry and A 
painting characterise Pre-Raphaelite work. For exam- 
ple, Morris' poems, " The Blue Closet " and " The Tune 
of Seven Towers " were inspired by the similarly entitled 
designs of Rossetti. They are interpretations in lan- 
guage of pictorial suggestions — " word-paintings " in a 
truer meaning than that much-abused piece of critical 
slang commonly bears. In one of these compositions — a 
water-colour, a study in colour and music symbolism- — 
four damozels in black and purple, white and green, 
scarlet and white, and crimson, are singing or playing 
on a lute and clavichord in a blue-tiled room ; while in 
front of them a red lily grows up through the floor. To 
this interior Morris' " stunning picture " — as his friend 
called it — adds an obscurely hinted love story : the bur- 
den of a bell booming a death-knell in the tower over- 
head; the sound of wind and sea; and the Christmas 
snows outside. Conversely Rossetti's painting, " Arthur's 
Tomb," was suggested by Morris' so-named poem in his 
1858 volume. 



3o6 tA History of English Romanticism. 

Or, again, compare Morris' poem, "Sir Galahad: A 
Christmas Mystery," with the following description of 
Rossetti's aquarelle, " How Sir Galahad, Sir Bors, and 
Sir Percival were fed with the Sane Grael; but Sir Per- 
cival's sister died by the way " : " On the right is painted 
the altar, and in front of it the damsel of the Sane Grael 
giving the cup to Sir Galahad, who stoops forward to 
take it over the dead body of Sir Percival's sister, who 
lies calm and rigid in her green robe and red mantle, and 
near whose feet grows from the ground an aureoled lily; 
while, with his left hand, the saintly knight leads for- 
ward his two companions, him who has lost his sister, and 
the good Sir Bors. Behind the white-robed damsel at 
the altar, a dove, bearing the sacred casket, poises on 
outspread pinions; and immediately beyond the fence 
enclosing the sacred space, stands a row of nimbused 
angels, clothed in white and with crossed scarlet or flame- 
coloured wings." * 

Rossetti's powerful ballad, "The King's Tragedy," 
was suggested by the mural paintings (encaustic) with 
which William Bell Scott decorated the circular staircase 
of Penkill Castle in 1865-68. These were a series of 
scenes from "The Kinges Quair" once attributed to 
James I. of Scotland. The photogravure reproduction, 
from a painting by Arthur Hughes of a section of the 
Penkill Castle staircase, represents the king looking 
from the window of his prison in Windsor Castle at Lady 
Jane Beaufort walking with her handmaidens in a very 
Pre-Raphaelite garden. At the left of the picture, Cupid 
aims an arrow at the royal lover. Rossetti, Hunt, and 
Millais were all great lovers of Keats. Hunt says that 
* Sharp's "Dante Gabriel Rossetti," p. 190. 



The Tre-I^aphaelites. 307 

his " Escape of Madeline and Prospero " was the first 
subject from Keats ever painted, and was highly ac- 
claimed by Rossetti. At the formation of the P.-R B. in 
1848, it was agreed that the first work of the Brotherhood 
should be in illustration of "Isabella," and a series of 
eight subjects was selected from the poem. Millais ex- 
ecuted at once his "Lorenzo and Isabella," but Hunt's 
"Isabella and the Pot of Basil" was not finished till 
1867, and Rossetti's part of the programme was never 
carried out. Rossetti's " La Belle Dame sans Merci," 
Mr. J. M, Strudwick's " Madness of Isabella," Arthur 
Hughes' triptych of "The Eve of St, Agnes," and Mil- 
lais' great painting, " St. Agnes' Eve," were other tributes 
of Pre-Raphaelite art to the young master of romantic 
verse. 

Whether this interpenetration of poetry and painting 
is of advantage to either, may admit of question. Emer- 
son said to Scott : " We [Americans] scarcely take to the 
Rossetti poetry; it does not come home to us; it is 
exotic." The sonnets of " The House of Life " have 
appeared to many readers obscure and artificial, the work- 
ing out in language of conceptions more easily expressi- 
ble by some other art; expressed here, at all events, 
through imagery drawn from a special and even techni- 
cal range of associations. Such readers are apt to imag- 
ine that Rossetti sufifers from a hesitation between poetry 
and painting; as Sidney Lanier is thought by some to 
have been injured artistically by halting midway between 
music and verse. The method proper to one art intrudes 
into the other; everything that the artist does has the air 
of an experiment; he paints poems and writes pictures. 

A department of Rossetti's verse consists of sonnets 



3o8 <i/f History of English l{omanticism. 

written for pictures; pictures by Botticelli, Mantegna, 
Giorgione, Burne-Jones, and others, and in many cases 
by himself, and giving thus a double rendering of the 
same invention. But even when not so occasioned, his 
poems nearly always suggest pictures. Their figures 
seem to have stepped down from some fifteenth-century 
altar piece bringing their aureoles and golden back- 
grounds with them. This is to be pictorial in a very dif- 
ferent sense from that in which Tennyson is said to be 
a pictorial poet. Hall Caine informs us that Rossetti 
" was no great lover of landscape beauty." His scenery 
does not, like Wordsworth's or Tennyson's, carry an im- 
pression of life, of the real outdoors. ' Nature with Ros- 
setti has been passed through the medium of another art 
before it comes into his poetry; it is a doubly distilled 
nature. It is nature as we have it in the *' Roman de la 
Rose," or the backgrounds of old Florentine painters: 
flowery pleasances and orchard closes, gardens with trel- 
lises and singing conduits, where ladies are playing at 
the palm play. In his most popular poem, " The Blessed 
Damozel " — a theme which he both painted and sang — 
the feeling is exquisitely and veraciously human. The 
maiden is " homesick in heaven," and yearns back tow- 
ards the earth and her lover left behind. Even so, with 
her symbolic stars and lilies, she is so like the stiff, 
sweet angels of Fra Angelico or Perugino, that one al- 
most doubts when the poet says 

" — hei" bosom must have made 
The bar she leaned on warm. " 

The imagery of the poem is right out of the picture world : 

"The clear ranged, unnumbered heads 
Bowed with their aureoles." 



The Tre-I^phaelites. 309 

The imaginations are Dantesque : 

"And the souls, mounting up to God, 
Went by her like thin flames." 

"The light thrilled towards her, filled 
With angels in strong, level flight." 

Even in " Jenny," one of the few poems of Rossetti that 
deal with modern life, mediaeval art will creep in. 

"Fair shines the gilded aureole 
In which our highest painters place 
Some living woman's simjile face. 
And the stilled features thus descried, 
As Jenny's long throat droops aside — 
The shadows where the cheeks are thin 
And pure wide curve from ear to chin — 
With Raffael's, Leonardo's hand 
To show them to men's souls might stand." 

The type of womanly beauty here described is character- 
istic; it is the type familiar to all in "Pandora," "Pros- 
erpine," "La Ghirlandata," "The Day Dream," "Our 
Lady of Pity," and the other life-size, half-length figure 
paintings in oil which were the masterpieces of his ma- 
turer style. The languid pose, the tragic eyes with their 
mystic, brooding intensity in contrast with the full curves 
of the lips and throat, give that union of sensuousness 
and spirituality which is a constant trait of Rossetti's 
poetry. The Pre-Raphaelites were accused of exagge- 
rating the height of their figures. In Burne-Jones, whose 
figures are eight and a half heads high, the exaggeration 
is deliberate. In Morris' and Swinburne's early poems 
all the lines of the female face and figure are long — the 
hand, the foot, the throat, the "curve from chin to ear," 
and above all, the hair.* The hair in these paintings of 

*See especially Morris' poem "Rapunzel" in "The De- 
fence of Guenevere. " 



3IO (t/^ History of English T{omanticism. 

Rossetti seems a romantic exaggeration, too; immense, 
crinkly waves of it spreading off to left and right. Wil- 
liam Morris' beautiful wife is said to have been his model 
in the pieces above named. 

The first collection of original poems by Rossetti was 
published in 1870. The manuscripts had been buried 
with his wife in 1862. When he finally consented to 
their publication, the coffin had to be exhumed and the 
manuscripts removed. In 1881 a new edition was issued 
with changes and additions; and in the same year the 
volume of "Ballads and Sonnets" was published, includ- 
ing the sonnet sequence of "The House of Life." Of 
the poems in these two collections which treat directly 
of Dante the most important is " Dante at Verona," a 
noble and sustained piece in eighty-five stanzas, slightly 
pragmatic in manner, in which are enwoven the legend- 
ary and historical incidents of Dante's exile related by 
the early biographers, together with many personal allu- 
sions from the " Divine Comedy." But Dante is no- 
where very far off either in Rossetti 's painting or in his 
poetry. In particular, the history of Dante's passion for 
Beatrice, as told in the "Vita Nuova," in which the figure 
of the girl is gradually transfigured and idealised by 
death into the type of heavenly love, made an enduring 
impression upon Rossetti's imagination. Shelley, in his 
" Epipsychidion," had appealed to this great love story, 
so characteristic at once of the mediaeval mysticism and 
of the Platonic spirit of the early Renaissance. But 
Rossetti was the first to give a thoroughly sympathetic 
interpretation of it to English readers. It became asso- 
ciated most intimately with his own love and loss. We 
see it in a picture like " Beata Beatrix," and a poem like 



The Tre-'T^phaelites. 311 

"The Portrait," written many years before his wife's 
death, but subsequently retouched. Who can read the 
following stanza without thinking of Beatrice and the 
"Paradiso"? 

" Even so, where Heaven holds breath and hears 
The beating heart of Love's own breast, — 
Where round the secret of all spheres 
All angels lay their wings to rest, — 
How shall my soul stand rapt and awed, 
When, by the new birth borne abroad 
Throughout the music of the suns, 
It enters in her soul at once 
And knows th*e silence there for God ! " 

Rossetti's ballads and ballad-romances, all intensely 
mediaeval in spirit, fall, as regards their manner, into 
two very different classes. Pieces like "The Blessed 
Damozel," " The Bride's Prelude," " Rose Mary," and 
"The Staff and Scrip" (from a story in the "Gesta 
Romanorum ") are art poems, rich, condensed, laden with 
ornament, pictorial. Every attitude of every figure is a 
pose; landscapes and interiors are painted with minute 
Pre-Raphaelite finish. "The Bride's Prelude" — a frag- 
ment — opens with the bride's confession to her sister, in 
the 'tiring-room sumptuous with gold and jewels and bro- 
cade, where the air is heavy with musk and myrrh, and 
sultry with the noon. In the pauses of her tale stray 
lute notes creep in at the casement, with noises from the 
tennis court and the splash of a hound swimming in the 
moat. In " Rose Mary," which employs the superstition -4. 
in the old lapidaries as to the prophetic powers of the 
beryl-stone, the colouring and imagery are equally opu- 
lent, and, in passages. Oriental. 

On the other hand, "Stratton Water," "Sister Helen," 
"The White Ship," and "The King's Tragedy " are imi- 



312 t// History of English l^pmantictsm. 

tations of popular poetry, done with a simulated rough- 
ness and simplicity. The first of these adopts a common 
ballad motive, a lover's desertion of his sweetheart 
through the contrivances of his wicked kinsfolk • 

"And many's the good gift, Lord Sands, 
You've promised oft to me ; 
But the gift of yours I keep to-day 
Is the babe in my body." . . . 

"Look down, look down, my false mother, 
That bade me not to grieve : 
You'll look up when our marriage fires 
Are lit to-morrow eve. " 

" Sister Helen " is a ballad in dialogue with a subtly 
varying repetend, and introduces the popular belief that 
a witch could kill a man slowly by melting a wax figure. 
Twice Rossetti essayed the historical ballad. "The 
White Ship" tells of the drowning of the son and daugh- 
ter of Henry I. with their whole ship's company, except 
one survivor, Berold, the butcher of Rouen, who relates 
the catastrophe. The subject of " The King's Tragedy " 
is the murder of James I. by Robert Graeme and his men 
in the Charterhouse of Perth. The teller of the tale is 
Catherine Douglas, known in Scottish tradition as Kate 
Barlass, who had thrust her arm through the staple, in 
place of a bar, to hold the door against the assassins. 
A few stanzas of " The Kinges Quair " are fitted into the 
poem by shortening the lines two syllables each, to ac- 
commodate them to the ballad metre. It is generally 
agreed that this was a mistake, as was also the introduc- 
tion of the " Beryl Songs " between the narrative parts of 
" Rose Mary." These ballads of Rossetti compare well 
with other modern imitations of popular poetry. "Sister 
Helen," <r.^., has much greater dramatic force than Ten- 



7he Vre-liaphaelites. 313 

nyson's " Oriana " or " The Sisters." Yet they impress 
one, upon the whole, as less characteristic than the poet's 
Italianate pieces; as tours de Jorce carefully pitched in 
the key of minstrel song, but falsetto in effect. Com- 
pared with such things as " Cadyow Castle" or "Jack 
o' Hazeldean," they are felt to be the work of an art 
poet, resolute to divest himself of fine language and 
scrupulously observant of ballad convention in phrase 
and accent — details of which Scott was often heedless — 
but devoid of that hearty, natural sympathy with the con- 
ditions of life from which popular poetry sprang, and 
wanting the lyrical pulse that beats in the ballad verse 
of Scott, Kingsley, and Hogg. In " The King's Trag- 
edy " Rossetti was poaching on Scott's own preserves, 
the territory of national history and legend. If we can 
guess how Scott would have handled the same story, we 
shall have an object lesson in two contrasted kinds of 
romanticism. Scott could not have bettered the grim 
ferocity of the murder scene, nor have equalled, perhaps, 
the tragic shadow of doom which is thrown over Ros- 
setti's poem by the triple warning of the weird woman. 
But the sense of the historic environment, the sense of 
the actual in places and persons, would have been stronger 
in his version. Graeme's retreat would have been the 
Perthshire Highlands, and not vaguely "the land of the 
wild Scots." And if scenery had been used, it would 
not have been such as this — a Pre-Raphaelite back- 
ground : 

" That eve was clenched for a boding storm, 

'Neath a toilsome moon half seen ; 
The cloud stooped low and the surf rose high ; 
And where there was a line of the sky, 

Wild wings loomed dark between." 



314 ^ History of English ^Romanticism. 

The historical sense was weak in Rossetti. It is not 
easy to imagine him composing a Waverley novel. The 
life of the community, as distinct from the life of the in- 
dividual, had little interest for him. The mellifluous 
names of his heroines, Aloyse, Rose Mary, Blanchelys, 
are pure romance. In his intense concentration upon 
the aesthetic aspects of every subject, Rossetti seemed, to 
those who came in contact with him, singularly borne. 
He was indifferent to politics, society, speculative 
thought, and the discoveries of modern science — to con- 
temporary matters in general.* It is to this narrow ebs- 
theticism that Mr. Courthope refers when, in comparing 
Coleridge and Keats with Rossetti and Swinburne, he 
finds in the latter an " extraordinary skill in the imita- 
tion of antique forms," but " less liberty of imagina- 
tion." f The contrast is most striking in the case of Cole- 
ridge, whose intellectual interests had so wide a range. 
Rossetti cared only for Coleridge's verse; William Mor- 
ris spoke with contempt of everything that he had written 
except two or three of his poems; | and Swinburne re- 

*"I can't say," wrote William Morris, "how it was that 
Rossetti took no interest in politics ; but so it was : of course 
he was quite Italian in his general turn of thought ; though I 
think he took less interest in Italian politics than in English. 
. . . The truth is, he cared for nothing but individual and per- 
sonal matters ; chiefly of course in relation to art and litera- 
ture." 

f "The Liberal Movement in English Literature." by W. J. 
Courthope, London, 1885, p. 230. 

% " Keats was a great poet who sometimes nodded. . . . 
Coleridge was a muddle-brained metaphysician who, by some 
strange freak of fortune, turned out a few real poems amongst 
the dreary flood of inanity which was his wont. ... I have 
been through the poems, and find that the only ones which 
have any interest for me are: (i) 'Ancient Mariner'; (2) 
' Christabel ' ; (3) ' Kubla Khan ' ; and (4) the poem called 
'Love ' " (Mackail's "Life of Morris," vol. ii., p. 310). 



The 'Pre-raphaelites. 315 

gretted that he had lost himself in the mazes of theology 
and philosophy, instead of devoting himself wholly to 
creative work. Keats, it is true, was exclusively pre- 
occupied with the beautiful; but he was more eclectic 
than Rossetti — perhaps also than Morris, though hardly 
than Swinburne. The world of classic fable, the world 
of outward nature were as dear to his imagination as the 
country of romance. Rossetti was not university bred, 
and, as we have seen, forgot his Greek early. Morris, 
like Swinburne, was an Oxford man; yet we hear him 
saying that he "loathes all classical art and literature."* 
In " The Life and Death of Jason " and " The Earthly 
Paradise " he treats classical and mediaeval subjects im- 
partially, but treats them both alike in mediaeval fashion; 
as Chaucer does, in "The Knightes Tale."t As for 
Rossetti, he is never classical. He makes Pre-Raphael- 
ite ballads out of the tale of Troy divine and the Rab- 
binical legends of Adam's first wife, Lilith; ballads with, 
quaint burdens — 

" (O Troy's down. 
Tall Troy's on fire)"; 

" (Sing Eden Bower ! 
Alas the hour !) " 

and whose very titles have an Old English familiarity — 
" Eden Bower," " Troy Town," as who says " London 
Bridge," " Edinboro' Town," etc. Swinburne has given 
the rationale of this type of art in his description of a 
Bacchus and Ariadne by Lippino Lippi (" Old Masters 

*"The Life of William Morris," byW. J. Mackail, London, 
1899, vol. ii., p. 171. 

f For the Chaucerian manipulation of classical subjects by 
Pre-Raphaelite artists see " Edward Burne- Jones, " by Mal- 
colm Bell, London, 1899. 



3i6 o^ History of English l^pmanticisin. 

at Florence "), "an older legend translated and trans- 
formed into mediaeval shape. More than any others, 
these painters of the early Florentine school reproduce 
in their own art the style of thought and work familiar 
to a student of Chaucer and his fellows or pupils. 
Nymphs have faded into fairies, and gods subsided into 
men. A curious realism has grown up out of that very 
ignorance and perversion which seemed as if it could not 
but falsify whatever thing it touched upon. This study 
of Fillippino's has all the singular charm of the romantic 
school. . . . The clear form has gone, the old beauty 
dropped out of sight . . . but the mediaeval or romantic 
form has an incommunicable charm of its own. . . . Be- 
fore Chaucer could give us a Pandarus or a Cressida, all 
knowledge and memory of the son of Lycaon and the 
daughter of Chryses must have died out, the whole poem 
collapsed into romance; but far as these maybe removed 
from the true tale and the true city of Troy, they are not 
phantoms." 

But of all this group, the one most thoroughly steeped 
in mediaevalism — to repeat his own description of him- 
self — was William Morris. He was the English equiva- 
lent of Gd.\xt\ex's homme moyeti dge ; and it was his en- 
deavour, in letters and art, to pick up and continue the 
mediaeval tradition, interrupted by four hundred years of 
modern civilisation. The sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries did not attract him ; and as for the eighteenth, 
it simply did not exist for him.* The ugliness of mod- 

*"The slough of despond which we call the eighteenth cen- 
tury" ("Hopes and Fears for Art," p. 211). "The English 
language, which under the hands of sycophantic verse-makers 
had been reduced to a miserable jargon . . . flowed clear, 
pure, and simple along with the music of Blake and Coleridge. 



The Vre-'^phaelites. 317 

em life, with its factories and railroads, its unpicturesque 
poverty and selfish commercialism, was hateful to him as 
it was to Ruskin — his teacher. He loved to imagine the 
face of England as it was in the time of Chaucer — his 
master; to 

"Forget six counties overhung with smoke. 
Forget the snorting steam and piston smoke, . . . 
And dream of London, small and white and clean. 
The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green." 

The socialistic Utopia depicted in his " News from No- 
where" (1890) is a regenerated Middle Age, without 
feudalism, monarchy, and the mediaeval Church, but also 
without densely populated cities, with handicrafts sub- 
stituted for manufactures, and with mediaeval architecture, 
house decoration, and costume. None of Morris' books 
deals with modern life, but all of them with an imagi- 
nary future or an almost equally imaginary past. This 
same " News from Nowhere " contains a passage of dia- 
logue in justification of retrospective romance. "'How 
is it that though we are so interested with our life for the 
most part, yet when people take to writing poems or 
painting pictures they seldom deal with our modern life, 
or if they do, take good care to make their poems or pic- 
tures unlike that life? Are we not good enough to paint 
ourselves.''' . . . ' It always was so, and I suppose al- 
ways will be,' said he, ' however, it may be explained. 
It is true that in the nineteenth century, when there was 
so little art and so much talk about it, there was a theory 
that art and imaginative literature ought to deal with 

Take those names, the earliest in date among ourselves, as a 
type of the change that has happened in literature since the 
time of George II." {ibid., p. 82). 



3i8 <iA History of English 'T^manticism. 

contemporary life; but they never did so; for, if there 
was any pretence of it, the author always took care . . . 
to disguise, or exaggerate, or idealise, and in some way 
or another make it strange ; so that, for all the verisimil- 
itude there was, he might just as well have dealt with the 
times of the Pharaohs.' " * 

The difference between the mediaeval ism of Rossetti 
and of Morris illustrates, in an interesting way, the varied 
results produced by the operation of similar influences 
on contrasted temperaments. The comparison which 
Morris' biographer makes between him and Burne-Jones 
holds true as between Morris and Rossetti : " They re- 
ceived or re-incarnated the Middle Ages through the 
eyes and brain, in the one case of a Norman, in the other 
of a Florentine." Morris was twice a Norman, in his 
love for the romancers and Gothic builders of northern 
France; and in his enthusiasm for the Icelandic sagas. 
His visits to Italy left him cold, and he confessed to a 
strong preference for the art of the North. " With the 
later work of Southern Europe I am quite out of sym- 
pathy. In spite of its magnificent power and energy, I feel 
it as an enemy; and this much more in Italy, where there 
is such a mass of it, than elsewhere. Yes, and even in 
these magnificent and wonderful towns I long rather for 
the heap of gray stones with a gray roof that we call a 
house north-away." Rossetti's Italian subtlety and mys- 
ticism are replaced in Morris by an English homeliness 
— a materialism which is Teutonic and not Latin or 
Celtic, and one surface indication of which is the scru- 
pulously Saxon vocabulary of his poems and prose ro- 
mances. " His earliest enthusiasms," said Burne-Jones, 
*Page 113. 



The Tre-l^phaelites. 319 

"were his latest. The thirteenth century was his ideal 
period always " — the century which produced the lovely 
French romances which he translated and the great 
French cathedrals which he admired above all other 
architecture on earth. But this admiration was aesthetic 
rather than religious. The Catholic note, so resonant in 
Rossetti's poetry, is hardly audible in Morris, at least 
after his early Oxford days. The influence of Newman 
still lingered at Oxford in the fifties, though the Trac- 
tarian movement had spent its force and a reaction had 
set in. Morris came up to the university an Anglo- 
Catholic, and like his fellow-student and life-long frien^J, 
Burne-Jones, had been destined to holy orders. We find 
them both, as undergraduates, eagerly reading the " Acta 
Sanctorum," the "Tracts for the Times," and Kenelm 
Digby's " Mores Catholici," and projecting a kind of 
monastic community, where celibacy should be practised 
and sacred art cultivated. Btit later impressions soon 
crowded out this early religious fervour. Churchly ascet- 
icism and the mediaeval "praise of virginity" made no 
part of Morris' social ideal. The body counted for much 
with him. In " News from Nowhere," marriage even is 
so far from being a sacrament, that it is merely a free 
arrangement terminable at the will of either party. 
Morris had a passionate love of earth and a regard for 
the natural instincts. He complains that Swinburne's 
poetry is "founded on literature, not on nature." His 
religion is a reversion to the old Teutonic pagan earth- 
worship, and he had the pagan dread of "quick-coming 
death." His paradise is an " Eartlily Paradise " ; it is 
in search of earthly immortality that his voyagers set sail. 
" Of heaven or hell," says his prelude, " I have no power 



320 <i/l History of English l^omanticism. 

to sing " ; and the great mediaeval singer of heaven and 
hell who meant so much to Rossetti, appealed hardly 
more to Morris than to Walter Scott. 

Moreover, Morris' work in verse was the precise equiv- 
alent of his work as a decorative artist, who cared little 
for easel pictures, and regarded painting as one method 
out of many for covering wall spaces or other surfaces.* 
His poetry is mainly narrative, but whether epical or 
lyrical in form, is always less lyric in essence than Ros- 
setti's. In its objective spirit and even distribution of 
emphasis, it contrasts with Rossetti's expressional in- 
tensity very much as Morris' wall-paper and tapestry de- 
signs contrast with paintings like " Beata Beatrix " and 
" Proserpina." Morris — as an artist — cared more for 
places and things than for people; and his interest was 
in the work of art itself, not in the personality of the 
artist. 

Quite unlike as was Morris to Scott in temper and 
mental endowment, his position in the romantic litera- 
ture of the second half-century answers very closely to 
Scott's in the first. His work resembled Scott's in vol- 
ume, and in its easiness for the general reader. For the 
second time he made the Middle Ages po/>u/ar. There 
was nothing esoteric in his art, as in Rossetti's. It was 



*"Sir Edward Burne-Jones told me that Morris would have 
liked the faces in his pictures less highly finished, and less 
charged with the concentrated meaning or emotion of the 
painting . . . and he thought that the dramatic and emo- 
tional interest of a picture ought to be diffused throughout it 
as equally as possible. Such, too, was his own practice in the 
cognate art of poetry ; and this is one reason why his poetry 
affords so few memorable single lines, and lends itself so little 
to quotation" (Mackail's "Life of William Morris," vol. ii., 
p. 272). 



The Tre-%aphaelites. 321 

English and came home to Englishmen. His poetry, 
like his decorative work, was meant for the people, and 
" understanded of the people." Moreover, like Scott, he 
was an accomplished raconteur, and a story well told is 
always sure of an audience. His first volume, "The 
Defence of Guenevere " (1858), dedicated to Rossetti 
and inspired by him, had little popular success. But 
when, like Millais, he abandoned the narrowly Pre- 
Raphaelite manner and broadened out, in "The Life 
and Death of Jason " (1867) and " The Earthly Paradise " 
(1868-70), into a fashion of narrative less caviare to the 
general, the public response was such as met Millais. 

Morris' share in the Pre-Raphaelite movement was in 
the special field of decorative art. His enthusiasm for 
Gothic architecture had been aroused at Oxford by a 
reading of Ruskin's chapter on " The Nature of Gothic " 
in "The Stones of Venice." In 1856, acting upon this 
impulse, he articled himself to the Oxford architect G. 
E. Street, and began work in his office. He did not 
persevere in the practice of the profession, and never 
built a house. But he became and remained a connois- 
seur of Gothic architecture and an active member of the 
Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. His 
numerous visits to Amiens, Chartres, Reims, Soissons, 
and Rouen were so many pilgrimages to the shrines of 
mediaeval art. Indeed, he always regarded the various 
branches of house decoration as contributory to the mas- 
ter art, architecture. 

A little later, under the dominating and somewhat 
overbearing persuasions of Rossetti, he tried his hand at 
painting, but never succeeded well in drawing the human 
face and figure. The figure designs for his stained 



322 ^ History of English l^pmanticism. 

glass, tapestries, etc., were usually made by Burne-Jones, 
Morris furnishing floriated patterns and the like. In 
1861 was formed the firm of Morris & Company, which 
revolutionised English household decoration. Rossetti 
and Burne-Jones were among the partners in this con- 
cern, which undertook to supply the public with high art 
work in wall painting, paper hangings, embroidery, car- 
pets, tapestries, printed cottons, stamped leather, carved 
furniture, tiles, metals, jewelry, etc. In particular, Mor- 
ris revived the mediaeval arts of glass-staining, illumi- 
nation, or miniature painting, and tapestry-weaving with 
the high-warp loom. Though he chose to describe him- 
self as a " dreamer of dreams born out of my due time," 
and " the idle singer of an empty day," he was a tireless 
practical workman of astonishing cleverness and versa- 
tility. He taught himself to dye and weave. When, in 
the last decade of the century, he set up the famous 
Kelmscott Press, devoted to artistic printing and book- 
making, he studied the processes of type-casting and 
paper manufacture, and actually made a number of sheets 
of paper with his own hands. It was his favourite idea 
that the division of labour in modern manufactures had 
degraded the workman by making him a mere machine; 
that the divorce between the art of the designer and the 
art of the handicraftsman was fatal to both. To him the 
Middle Ages meant, not the ages of faith, or of chivalry, 
or of bold and free adventure, but of popular art — of 
" The Lesser Arts " ; when every artisan was an artist of 
the beautiful and took pleasure in the thing which his 
hand shaped; when not only the cathedral and the cas- 
tle, but the townsman's dwelling-house and the labourer's 
cottage was a thing of beauty. He believed that in 



The Tre-I^phaelites. 323 

those times there was, as there should be again, an art 
by the people and for the people. It was the democratic 
and not the aristocratic elements of mediaeval life that 
he praised. "From the first dawn of history till quite 
modern times, art, which nature meant to solace all, ful- 
filled its purpose; all men shared in it; that was what 
made life romantic, as people call it, in those days; that 
and not robber-barons and inaccessible kings with their 
hierarchy of serving-nobles and other such rubbish." * 
One more passage will serve to set in sharp contrast the 
romanticism of Scott and the romanticism of Ruskin and 
Morris. "With that literature in which romance, that is 
to say humanity, was re-born, there sprang up also a feel- 
ing for the romance of external nature, which is surely 
strong in us now, joined with a longing to know some- 
thing real of the lives of those who have gone before us; 
of these feelings united you will find the broadest ex- 
pression in the pages of Walter Scott; it is curious, as 
showing how sometimes one art will lag behind another 
in a revival, that the man who wrote the exquisite and 
wholly unfettered naturalism of * The Heart of Midlo- 
thian,' for instance, thought himself continually bound to 
seem to feel ashamed of, and to excuse himself for, his 
love of Gothic architecture; he felt that it was romantic, 
and he knew that it gave him pleasure, but somehow he 
had not found out that it was art, having been taught in 
many ways that nothing could be art that was not done 
by a named man under academical rules." f 

It is worth while to glance at Morris' culture-history 
and note the organic filaments which connect the later 

*" Hopes and Fears for Art," p. 79. 
\Jdid., p. 83. 



324 e// History of English T^pmanticism. 

with the earlier romanticism. He had read the Waverley 
novels as a child, and had even snatched a fearful joy 
from Clara Reeve's "Old English Baron."* He knew 
his Tennyson before he went up to Oxford, but reserved 
an unqualified admiration only for such things as 
" Oriana " and " The Lady of Shalott." He was greatly 
excited by the woodcut engraving of Diirer's "Knight, 
Death and the Devil " in an English translation of 
Fouque's " Sintram." f Rossetti was first made known 
to him by Ruskin's Edinburgh lectures of 1854 and by 
the illustration to Allingham's -" Maids of Elfin Mere," 
over which Morris and Burne-Jones " pored continually." 
Morris devoured greedily all manner of mediaeval chroni- 
cles and romances, French and English; but he read 
little in Elizabethan and later authors. He disliked 
Milton and Wordsworth, and held Keats to be the fore- 
most of modern English poets. He took no interest in 
mythology, or Welsh poetry or Celtic literature gener- 
ally, with the exception of the " Morte Darthur," which, 
Rossetti assured him, was second only to the Bible. The 
Border ballads had been his delight since childhood. 
An edition of these; a selection of English mediaeval 
lyrics; and a "Morte Darthur," with a hundred illustra- 
tions from designs by Burne-Jones, were among the un- 
fulfilled purposes of the Kelmscott Press. 

Morris' first volume, " The Defence of Guenevere and 
Other Poems," was put forth in 1858 (reprint in 1875) ; 
" a book," says Saintsbury, " almost as much the herald 
of the second school of Victorian poetry as Tennyson's 
early work was of the first." J " Many of the poems," 

*See vol. i., pp. 241-43. f Vz'de supra, p. 152. 

X"A Short History of English Literature," p. 783. 



The Tre-I^phaelites. 325 

wrote William Bell Scott, "represent the mediaeval spirit 
in a new way, not by a sentimental, nineteenth-century- 
revival mediasvalism, but they give a poetical sense of a 
barbaric age strongly and sharply real." * These last 
words point at Tennyson, The first four pieces in the 
volume are on Arthurian subjects, but are wholly differ- 
ent in style and conception even from such poems as 
" The Lady of Shalott " and " Sir Lancelot and Queen 
Guinevere." They are more mannerised, more in the 
spirit of Pre-Raphaelite art, than anything in Morris' 
later work. If the name-poem is put beside Tennyson's 
idyl " Guinevere " ; or "Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mys- 
tery," beside Tennyson's " Sir Galahad," the difference 
is striking. In place of the refined ethics and senti- 
ment, and purely modern spiritual ideals which find a 
somewhat rhetorical expression in Tennyson, Morris en- 
deavours to render the genuine Catholic mediaeval ma- 
terialistic religious temper as it appears in Malory; 
where unquestioning belief, devotion, childish supersti- 
tion, and the fear of hell coexist with fleshly love and 
hate — a passion of sin and a passion of repentance. 
Guenevere's "defence" is, at bottom, the same as 
Phryne's : 

" See through my long throat how the words go up 
In ripples to my mouth ; how in my hand 
The shadow lies like wine within a cup 
Of marvellously colour' d gold." 

" Dost thou reck 
That I am beautiful. Lord, even as you 
And your dear mother? " f 

Morris criticised Tennyson's Galahad, as "rather a 

*" Recollections of Rossetti," vol. ii., p. 42. 
f "King Arthur's Tomb." 



326 cy^ History of English '^manticism. 

mild youth." His own Galahad is not the rapt seer of 
the vision beatific, but a more flesh-and-blood character, 
who sometimes has cold fits in which he doubts whether 
the quest is not a fool's errand; and whether even Sir 
Palomydes in his unrequited love, and Sir Lancelot in 
his guilty love, do not take greater comfort than he. 

Other poems in the book were inspired by Froissart's 
" Chronicle " or other histories of the English wars in 
France: " Sir Peter Harpdon's End," " Concerning Gef- 
fray Teste Noire," "The Eve of Crecy," etc.* Still 
others, and these not the least fascinating, were things of 
pure invention, lays of " a country lit with lunar rainbows 
and ringing with fairy song." f These have been thought 
to owe something to Edgar Poe; but they much more 
nearly resemble the work of the latest symbolistic 
schools. When reading such poems as " Rapunzel," 
"Golden Wings," and "The Tune of Seven Towers," 
one is frequently reminded of " Serres Chaudes" or " Pel- 
Idas et Mdlisande"; and is at no loss to understand why 
Morris excepted Maeterlinck from his general indiffer- 
ence to contemporary writers — Maeterlinck, like himself, 
a student of Rossetti. There is no other collection of 
English poems so saturated with Pre- Raphael itism. The 
flowers are all orchids, strange in shape, violent in col- 
ouring. Rapunzel, e.g., is like one of Maeterlinck's 
spellbound princesses. She stands at the top of her 
tower, letting down her hair to the ground, and her lover 
climbs up to her by it as by a golden stair. Here is 
again the singular Pre-Raphaelite and symbolistic scen- 

*One of these, "The Haystack in the Floods," has a tragic 
power unexcelled by any later work of Morris, 
f Saintsbury, p. 785. 



The Tre-^apbaelites. 327 

ery, with its images from art and not from nature. Tall 
damozels in white and scarlet walk in garths of lily and 
sunflower, or under apple boughs, and feed the swans in 
the moat. 

"Moreover, she held scarlet lilies, such 
As Maiden Margaret bears upon the light 
Of the great church walls."* 

" Lord, give Mary a dear kiss. 

And let gold Michael, who look'd down. 
When I was there, on Rouen town, 
From the spire, bring me that kiss 
On a lily!"t 

The language is as artfully quaint as the imaginations 
are fantastic : 

" Between the trees a large moon, the wind lows 
Not loud, but as a cow begins to low." X 

"Pale in the green sky were the stars, I ween, 
Because the moon shone like a star she shed 
When she dwelt up in heaven a while ago. 
And ruled all things but God."§ 

" Quiet groans 
That swell out the little bones 
Of my bosom." | 

"I sit on a purple bed. 
Outside, the wall is red, 
Thereby the apple hangs, 
And the wasp, caught by the fangs, 
Dies in the autumn night. 
And the bat flits till light. 
And the love-crazed knight 
Kisses the long, wet grass. "T 

A number of these pieces are dramatic in form, mono- 
logues or dialogues, sometimes in the manner of the 

* " King Arthur' s Tomb. " f " Rapunzel. " 

X " King Arthur's Tomb." § Idtd. 

jl" Rapunzel." T| "Golden Wings." 



328 <iA History of English l^omanticism. 

medieval mystery plays.* Others are ballads, not of the 
popular variety, but after Rossetti's fashion, employing 
burdens, English or French : 

"Two red roses across the moon " ; 

" Hah ! hah ! la belle jaune giroflee " ; 

"Ah ! qu'elle est belle La Marguerite" ; etc. 

The only poem in the collection which imitates the style 
of the old minstrel ballad is " Welland Water." The 
name-poem is in ferza rima; the longest, " Sir Peter 
Harpdon's End," in blank verse; "Golden Wings," in 
the " In Memoriam " stanza. 

When Morris again came before the public as a poet, 
his style had undergone a change akin to that which 
transformed the Pre-Raphaelite painter into the decora- 
tive artist. The skeins of vivid romantic colour had run 
out into large-pattern tapestries. There was nothing 
eccentric or knotty about " The Life and Death of Jason " 
and " The Earthly Paradise." On the contrary, nothing 
so facile, pellucid, pleasant to read had appeared in 
modern literature — a poetic lubberland, a "clear, un- 
wrinkled song." The reader was carried along with no 
effort and little thought on the long swell of the verse, 
his ear lulled by the musical lapse of the rime, his e3'e 
soothed — not excited — by ever-unrolling panoramas of 
an enchanted country " east of the sun and west of the 
moon." Morris wrote with incredible ease and rapidity. 
It was a maxim with him, as with Ruskin, that all good 
work is done easily and with pleasure to the workman; 
and certainly that seems true of him which Lowell said 
of Chaucer — that he never " puckered his brow over an 

* See "Sir Galahad," "The Chapel in Lyoness, ""A Good 
Knight in Prison." 



7he Vre-l^phaelites. 329 

unmanageable verse." Chaucer was his avowed master,* 
and perhaps no English narrative poet has come so near 
to Chaucer. Like Chaucer, and unlike Scott, he did not 
invent stories, but told the old stories over again with a 
new charm. His poetry, as such, is commonly better 
than Scott's; lacking the fire and nervous energy of Scott 
in his great passages, but sustained at a higher artistic 
level. He had the copious vein of the mediaeval chron- 
iclers and romancers, without their tiresome prolixity 
and with finer resources of invention. He had none of 
Chaucer's humour, realism, or skill in character sketch- 
ing. In its final impression his poetry resembles Spenser's 
more than Chaucer's. Like Spenser's, it grows monot- 
onous — without quite growing languid — from the steady 
flow of the metre and the exhaustless profusion of the 
imagery. The reader becomes, somewhat ungratefully, 
surfeited with beauty, and seeks relief in poetry more 
passionate or intellectual. Chaucer and, in a degree, 
Walter Scott, have a way of making old things seem near 
to us. In Spenser and Morris, though bright and clear 
in all imagined details, they stand at an infinite remove, 
in a world apart — 

" — a little isle of bliss 
Midmost the beating of the steely sea " 

which typifies the weary problems and turmoil of con- 
temporary life. 

"Jason " was a poem of epic dimensions, on the win- 
ning of the Golden Fleece; "The Earthly Paradise," a 
series of twenty-four narrative poems set in a framework 
of the poet's own. Certain gentlemen of Norway, in the 

*See "Jason," Book xvii., 5-24, and the Envoi to "The 
Earthly Paradise." 



33° <^ History of English l^manticism. 

reign of Edward III. of England, set out — like St. Bran- 
dan — on a voyage in search of a land that is free from 
death. They cross the Western ocean, and after long 
years of wandering, come, disappointed of their hope, to 
a city founded centuries since by exiles from ancient 
Greece. There being hospitably received, hosts and 
guests interchange tales in every month of the year; a 
classical story alternating with a mediaeval one, till the 
double sum of twelve is complete. Among the wanderers 
are a Breton and a Suabian, so that the mediaeval tales 
have a wide range. There are Norse stories like " The 
Lovers of Gudrun " ; French Charlemagne romances, 
like "Ogier the Dane"; and late German legends of the 
fourteenth century, like "The Hill of Venus," besides 
miscellaneous travelled fictions of the Middle Age.* 
But the Hellenic legends are reduced to a common term 
with the romance material, so that the reader is not very 
sensible of a difference. Many of them are selected for 
their marvellous character, and abound in dragons, mon- 
sters, transformations, and enchantments: "The Golden 
Apples," "Bellerophon," "Cupid and Psyche," "The 
Story of Perseus," etc. Even " Jason " is treated as a 
romance. Of its seventeen books, all but the last are 
devoted to the exploits and wanderings of the Argonauts. 

*Some of Morris' sources were William of Malmesbury, 
"Mandeville's Travels," the "Gesta Romanorum, " and the 
'"Golden Legend." "The Man Born to be King" was derived 
from "The Tale of King Constans, the Emperor" in a volume 
of French romances ("Nouvelles frangaises en prose du 
xiii.ieme Siecle, " Paris, 1856) of which he afterwards (1896) 
made a prose translation. The collection included also "The 
Friendship of Amis and Amile " ; " King Floras and the Fair 
Jehane"; and "The History of Over Sea"; besides "Aucas- 
sin and Nicolete, " which Morris left out because it had been 
already rendered into English by Andrew Lang. 



The Tre-I^apbaelites. 331 

Medea is not the wronged, vengeful queen of the Greek 
tragic poets, so much as she is the Colchian sorceress 
who effects her lover's victory and escape. Her roman- 
tic, outweighs her dramatic character. Sea voyages, em- 
prizes, and wild adventures, like those of his own wan- 
derers in " The Earthly Paradise," were dearer to Morris' 
imagination than conflicts of the will; the voffro? or 
home-coming of Ulysses, e.g. He preferred the " Odys- 
sey" to the "Iliad," and translated it in 1887 into the 
thirteen-syllabled line of the "Nibelungenlied." * Of 
the Greek tales in " The Earthly Paradise," " The Love 
of Alcestis " has, perhaps, the most dramatic quality. 

Like Chaucer and like Rossetti,f Morris mediaevalised 
classic fable. " Troy," says his biographer, " is to his 
imagination a town exactly like Bruges or Chartres; 
spired and gabled, red-roofed, filled (like the city of King 
yEetes in ' The Life and Death of Jason ') with towers 
and swinging bells. The Trojan princes go out, like 
knights in Froissart, to tilt at the barriers." | The dis- 
tinction between classical and romantic treatment is well 
illustrated by a comparison of Theocritus' idyl " Hylas," 
with the same episode in "Jason." " Soon was he 'ware 
of a spring," says the Syracusan poet, " in a hollow land, 
and the rushes grew thickly round it, and dark swallow- 
wort, and green maiden-hair, and blooming parsley and 
deer-grass spreading through the marshy land. In the 
midst of the water the nymphs were arraying their 
dances, the sleepless nymphs, dread goddesses of the 
country people, Eunice, and Malis, and Nycheia, with 

*His Vergil's "^neid, " in the old fourteeuer of Chapman, 
was published in 1876. 
f Vzcie supra, p. 315. ifMackail, i., p. 168. 



332 e^ History of English l^omanticism. 

her April eyes. And now the boy was holding out the 
wide-mouthed pitcher to the water, intent on dipping it; 
but the nymphs all clung to his hand, for love of the 
Argive lad had fluttered the soft hearts of all of them. 
Then down he sank into the black water." * In " Jason," 
where the episode occupies some two hundred and 
seventy lines, one of the nymphs meets the boy in the 
wood, disguised in furs like a northern princess, and 
lulls him to sleep by the stream side with a Pre-Raphael- 
ite song : 

"I know a little garden close 
Set thick with lily and red rose " ; 

the loveliest of all the lyrical passages in Morris' narra- 
tive poems except possibly the favourite two-part song in 
" Ogier the Dane " : 

"In the white-flower'd hawthorne brake, 
Love, be merry for my sake : 
Twine the blossoms in my hair, 
Kiss me where I am most fair — 
Kiss me, love ! for who knoweth 
What thing cometh after death?" 

This is the strain which recurs in all Morris' poetry with 
the insistence of a burden, and lends its melancholy to 
every season of " the rich year slipping by." 

Three kinds of verse are employed in " The Earthly 
Paradise": the octosyllabic couplet; the rime royal, 
which was so much a favourite with Chaucer; and the 
heroic couplet, handled in the free, "enjambed" fashion 
of Hunt and Keats. 

" Love is Enough," in the form of a fifteenth-century 
morality play, and treating a subject from the " Mabino- 

* Lang's translation. 



The Tre-^aphaelites. 333 

gion," appeared in 1873. Mackail praises its delicate 
mechanism in the use of " receding planes of action " 
(Love is prologue and chorus, and there is a musical 
accompaniment); but the dramatic form only emphasises 
the essentially undramatic quality of the author's genius. 
What is the matter with Morris' poetry? For something 
is the matter with it. Beauty is there in abundance, a 
rich profusion of imagery. The narrative moves with- 
out a hitch. Passion is not absent, passionate love 
and regret; but it speaks a sleepy language, and the 
final impression is dream-like. I believe that the singu- 
lar lack which one feels in reading these poems comes 
from Morris' dislike of rhetoric and moralising, the two 
main nerves of eighteenth-century verse. Left to them- 
selves, these make sad work of poetry ; yet poetry includes 
eloquence, and life includes morality. The poetry of 
Morris is sensuous, as upon the whole poetry should be; 
but in his resolute abstention from the generalizing habit 
of the previous century, the balance is lost between the 
general and the concrete, which all really great poetry 
preserves. Byron declaims and Wordsworth moralises, 
both of them perhaps too much ; yet in the end to the 
advantage of their poetry, which is full of truths, or of 
thoughts conceived as true, surcharged with emotion and 
uttered with passionate conviction. One looks in vain 
in Morris' pages for such things as 

" There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away " ; 

'^^ " — the good die first. 

And thej' whose hearts are dry as summer dust, 

Burn to the socket." 

.Such coin of universal currency is rare in Morris, as 
has once before been said. Not that quotability is an 



334 <^ History of English l^omanticism. 

absolute test of poetic value; for then Pope would rank 
higher than Spenser or Shelley. But its absence in 
Morris is significant in more than one way. 

While " The Earthly Paradise " was in course of com- 
position, a new intellectual influence came into Morris' 
life, the influence of the Icelandic sagas. Much had 
been done to make Old Norse literature accessible to 
English readers since the days when Gray put forth his 
Runic scraps and Percy translated Mallet.* Walter 
Scott, e.^., had given an abstract of the "Eyrbyggja 
Saga." Amos Cottle had published at Bristol in 1797 a 
metrical version of the mythological portion of the 
" Elder Edda " (" Icelandic Poetry, or the Edda of Sae- 
mund"), with an introductory verse epistle by Southey. 
Sir George Dasent's translation of the "Younger Edda" 
appeared in 1842; Laing's "Heimskringla" in 1844; 
Dasent's " Burnt Nial " in 186 1 ; his " Gisli the Outlaw," 
and Head's "Saga of Viga-Glum " in 1866. William 
and Mary Howitt's " Literature and Romance of Northern 
Europe" appeared in 1852. Morris had made the ac- 
quaintance of Thorpe's "Northern Mythology" (1851) 
and "Yuletide Stories" (1853) at Oxford; two of the 
tales in " The Earthly Paradise " were suggested by them : 
"The Land East of the Sun" and "The Fostering of 
Aslaug." These, however, he had dealt with independ- 
ently and in an ultra-romantic spirit. But in 1869 he 
took up the study of Icelandic under the tuition of Mr. 
Erick Magnusson; in collaboration with whom he is- 
sued a number of translations.! " The Lovers of Gud- 
run" in "The Earthly Paradise" was taken from the 

* See vol. i. , pp. 190-92. 

f The " Grettis Saga " (1869) : the " Vblsunga Saga " (1870) ; 
"Three Northern Love Stories" (1875). 



The Tre-%apbaelites. 335 

"Laxdaela Saga," and is in marked contrast with the 
other poems in the collection. There is no romantic 
glamour about it. It is a grim, domestic tragedy, mov- 
ing among the homeliest surroundings. Save for the 
lawlessness of a primitive state of society which gave 
free play to the workings of the passions, the story might 
have passed in Yorkshire or New England. A book like 
" Wuthering Heights," or " Pembroke," occasionally ex- 
hibits the same obstinate Berserkir rage of the tough old 
Teutonic stock, operating under modern conditions. For 
the men and women of the sagas are hard as iron; their 
pride is ferocious, their courage and sense of duty inflex- 
ible, their hatred is as enduring as their love. The 
memory of a slight or an injury is nursed for a lifetime, 
and when the hour of vengeance strikes, no compunction, 
not even the commonest human instincts — such as mother 
love — can avert the blow. Signy in the "Volsunga 
Saga " is implacable as fate. To avenge the slaughter 
of the Volsungs is with her an obsession, a fixed idea. 
When incest seems the only pathway to her purpose, she 
takes that path without a moment's hesitation. The con- 
temptuous indifference with which she hands over her 
own little innocent children to death is more terrible 
than the readiness of the fierce Medea to sacrifice her 
young brothers to Jason's safety; more terrible by far 
than the matricide of Orestes. 

The colossal mythology of the North had impressed 
Gray's imagination a century before. Carlyle in his 
" Hero Worship " (1840) had given it the preference over 
the Greek, as an expression of race character and imag- 
ination. In the preface to his translation of the "Vol- 
sunga Saga," Morris declared his surprise that no ver- 



$S^ zA History of English '^{omanticism. 

sion of the story yet existed in English, He said that it 
was one of the great stories of the world, and that to all 
men of Germanic blood it ought to be what the tale of 
Troy had been to the whole Hellenic race. In 1876 he 
cast it into a poem, " Sigurd the Volsung," in four books 
in riming lines of six iambic or anapaestic feet. "The 
Lovers of Gudrun " drew its material from one of that 
class of sagas which rest upon historical facts. The 
family vendetta which it narrates, in the Iceland of the 
eleventh century, is hardly more fabulous — hardly less 
realistic — than any modern blood feud in the Tennessee 
mountains. The passions and dramatic situations are 
much the same in both. The " Volsunga Saga " belongs 
not to romantic literature, strictly speaking, but to the 
old cycle of hero epics, to that earlier Middle Age which 
preceded Christian chivalry. It is the Scandinavian 
version of the story of the Niblungs, which Wagner's 
music-dramas have rendered in another art. But in 
common with romance, it abounds in superhuman wonders. 
It is full of Eddaic poetry and mythology. Sigmund and 
Sinfiotli change themselves into were wolves, like the peo- 
ple in "William of Palermo": Sigurd slays Fafnir, the 
dragon who guards the hoard, and his brother Regni, the 
last of the Dwarf-kin; Grimhild bewitches Sigurd with 
a cup of evil drink; Sigmund draws from the hall pillar 
the miraculous sword of Odin, and its shards are after- 
wards smithed by Regni for the killing of the monster. 

Morris was so powerfully drawn to the Old Norse lit- 
erature that he made two visits to Iceland, to verify the 
local references in the sagas and to acquaint himself with 
the strange Icelandic landscapes whose savage sublimity 
is reflected in the Icelandic writings, " Sigurd the Vol- 



The Tre-I^apbaelites. 337 

sung" is probably the most important contribution of 
Norse literature to English poetry; but it met with no 
such general acceptance as "The Earthly Paradise." 
The spirit which created the Northern mythology and 
composed the sagas is not extinct in the English descend- 
ants of Frisians and Danes, There is something of it in 
the minstrel ballads; but it has been so softened by 
modem life and tempered with foreign culture elements, 
that these old tales in their aboriginal, barbaric stern- 
ness repel. It is hard for any blossom of modern poetry 
to root itself in the scoriae of Hecla. 

An indirect result of Morris' Icelandic studies was his 
translation of Beowulf (1897), not a success; another was 
the remarkable series of prose poems or romances, which 
he put forth in the last ten years of his life.* There is 
nothing else quite like these. They are written in a pe- 
culiar archaic English which the author shaped for him- 
self out of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century models, 
like the " Morte Darthur " and the English translation of 
the " Gesta Romanorum," but with an anxious preference 
for the Saxon and Danish elements of the vocabulary. 
It is a dialect in which a market town is called a 
" cheaping-stead," a popular assembly a "folk-mote," 
foresters are " wood-abiders," sailors are " ship-carles," 
a family is a "kindred," poetry is " song-craft," t and 

* These, in order of publication, were "The House of the 
Wolfings" (1889) ; "The Roots of the Mountains" (1890) ; 
"The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891) ; "The Wood Be- 
yond the World" (1894) ; "The Well at the World's End" 
(1896) ; "The Water of the Wondrous Isles" (1897) ; and 
" The Sundering Flood " (1898). 

f Morris became so intolerant of French vocables that he 
detested and would "fain " have eschewed the very word lit- 
erature. 



S2^ <v^ History of English Romanticism. 

any kind of enclosure is a "garth." The prose is fre- 
quently interchanged with verse, not by way of lyrical 
outbursts, but as a variation in the narrative method, 
after the manner of the Old French cantejabks^ such as 
" Aucassin et Nicolete " ; but more exactly after the man- 
ner of the sagas, in which the azoic rock of Eddaic poetry 
crops out ever and anon under the prose strata. This 
Saxonism of style is in marked contrast with Scott, who 
employs without question the highly latinised English 
which his age had inherited from the last. Nor are 
Morris' romances historical in the manner of the Waver- 
ley novels. The first two of the series, however, are his- 
torical in the sense that they endeavour to reproduce 
in exact detail the picture of an extinct society. Time 
and place are not precisely indicated, but the scene is 
somewhere in the old German forest, and the period is 
early in the Christian era, during the obscure wanderings 
and settlements of the Gothic tribes. " The House of 
the Wolfings " concerns the life of such a community, 
which has made a series of clearings in " Mirkwood " on 
a stream tributary to the Rhine. The folk of Midmark 
live very much as Tacitus describes the ancient Germans 
as living. Each kindred dwells in a great common hall, 
like the hall of the Niblungs or the Volsungs, or of 
King Hrothgar in "Beowulf." Their herding and agri- 
culture are described, their implements and costumes, 
feasts in hall, songs, rites of worship, public meetings, 
and finally their warfare when they go forth against the 
invading Romans. In " The Roots of the Mountains " 
the tribe of the Wolf has been driven into the woods and 
mountains by the vanguard of the Hunnish migrations. 
In time they make head against these, drive them back, 



The Tre-%aphaelites. 339 

and retake their fertile valley. In each case there is a 
love story and, as in Scott, the private fortunes of the 
hero and heroine are enwoven with the ongoings of pub- 
lic events. But it is the general life of the tribe that is of 
importance, and there is little individual characterisation. 
There is a class of thralls in " The House of the Wolf- 
ings," but no single member of the class is particular- 
ised, like Garth, the thrall of Cedric, in " Ivanhoe." 

The later numbers of the series have no semblance of 
actuality. The last of all, indeed, "The Sundering 
Flood," is a war story which attains an air of geograph- 
ical precision by means of a map — like the plan of Egdon 
Heath in " The Return of the Native " — but the region 
and its inhabitants are alike fabulous. Romances such 
as "The Water of the Wondrous Isles" and "The Wood 
beyond the World " (the names are not the least imagi- 
native feature of these curious books) are simply a new 
kind of fairy tales. Unsubstantial as Duessa or Armida 
or Circe or Morgan le Fay are the witch-queen of the Wood 
beyond the World and the sorceress of the enchanted Isle 
of Increase Unsought. The white Castle of the Quest, 
with its three champions and their ladies, Aurea, Atra, 
and Viridis ; the yellow dwarfs, the magic boat, the wicked 
Red Knight, and his den, the Red Hold; the rings and 
spells and charms and garments of invisibility are like 
the wilder parts of Malory or the Arabian Nights. 

Algernon Charles Swinburne was an early adherent of 
the Pre-Raphaelite school, although such of his work 
as is specifically Gothic is to be found mainly in the 
first series of "Poems and Ballads" (1866);* a volume 

* This collection is made up of Swinburne's earliest work, 
but is antedated in point of publication by "The Queen 



340 «^ History of English %omanticism. 

which corresponds to Morris' first fruits, " The Defence 
of Guenevere." If Morris is prevailingly a Goth — a 
heathen Norseman or Saxon — Swinburne is, upon the 
whole, a Greek pagan. Rossetti and Morris inherit from 
Keats, but Swinburne much more from Shelley, whom 
he resembles in his Hellenic spirit,, as well as in his 
lyric fervour, his shrill radicalism — political and relig- 
ious — and his unchastened imagination. Probably the 
cunningest of English metrical artists, his art is more 
closely affiliated with music than with painting. Not 
that there is any paucity of imagery in his poetry; the 
imagery is superabundant, crowded, but it is blurred by 
an iridescent spray of melodious verbiage. The confu- 
sion of mind which his work often produces does not 
arise from romantic vagueness, from the dreamlike and 
mysterious impression left by a ballad of Coleridge's or 
a story of Tieck's ; but rather, as in Shelley's case, from 
the dizzy splendour and excitement of the diction. His 
verse, like Shelley's, is full of foam and flame, and the 
result upon the reader is to bewilder and exhaust. He 
does not describe in pictures, like Rossetti and Morris, 
but by metaphors, comparisons, and hyperboles. Take 
the following very typical passage — the portrait of Iseult 
in "Tristram of Lyonesse" (1882): 

"The very veil of her bright flesh was made 
As of light woven and moonbeam-colored shade 
More fine than moonbeams ; white her eyelids shone 
As snow sun-stricken that endures the sun. 
And through their curled and coloured clouds of deep, 
Luminous lashes, thick as dreams in sleep, 

Mother, and Rosamond " (1861) dedicated to Rossetti ; apd 
"Atalanta in Calydon " (1865). "Poems and Ballads" was 
inscribed to Burne-Jones. 



The Tre-'T{aphaeUtes. 341 

Shone, as the sea's depth swallowing up the sky's, 

The springs of unimaginable eyes. 

As the wave's subtler emerald is pierced through 

With the utmost heaven's inextricable blue, 

And both are woven and molten in one sleight 

Of amorous colour and implicated light 

Under the golden guard and gaze of noon, 

So glowed their aweless amorous plenilune, 

Azure and gold and ardent grey, made strange 

With fiery difference and deep interchange 

Inexplicable of glories multiform ; 

Now, as the sullen sapphire swells towards storm 

Foamless, their bitter beauty grew acold. 

And now afire with ardour of fine gold. 

Her flower-soft lips were meek and passionate, 

For love upon them like a shadow sate 

Patient, a foreseen vision of sweet things, 

A dream with eyes fast shut and plumeless wings 

That knew not what man's love or life should be, 

Nor had it sight nor heart to hope or see 

What thing should come ; but, childlike satisfied. 

Watched out its virgin vigil in soft pride 

And unkissed expectation ; and the glad 

Clear cheeks and throat and tender temples had 

Such maiden heat as if a rose's blood 

Beat in the live heart of a lily-bud." 



What distinct image of the woman portrayed does one 
carry away from all this squandered wealth of words and 
tropes? Compare the entire poem with one of Tenny- 
son's Arthurian " Idyls," or even with Matthew Arnold's 
not over-prosperous " Tristram and Iseult,"' or with any 
of the stories in "The Earthly Paradise," and it will be 
seen how far short it falls of being good verse narrative 
— with its excesses of language and retarded movement. 
Wordsworth said finely of Shakspere that he could not 
have written an epic : " he would have perished from a 
plethora of thought." It is not so much plethora of 
thought as lavishness of style which clogs the wheels in 
Swinburne. Too often his tale is 



342 nA History of English Romanticism. 

"Like a tale of the little meaning, 
Though the words are strong. " 

But his narrative method has analogies, not only with 
things like Shelley's " Laon and Cythna," but with Eliz- 
abethan poems such as Marlowe and Chapman's " Hero 
and Leander," If not so conceited as these, it is equally 
encumbered with sticky sweets which keep the story from 
getting forward. 

The symbolism which characterises a great deal of 
Pre-Raphaelite art is not conspicuous in Swinburne, 
whose spirit is not mystical. But two marks of the Pre- 
Raphaelite — and, indeed, of the romantic manner gen- 
erally — are obtrusively present in his early work. One 
of these is the fondness for microscopic detail at the 
expense of the obvious, natural outlines of the subject. 
Thus of Proserpine at Enna, in the piece entitled "At 
Eleusis," 

" — she lying down, red flowers 
Made their sharp little shadows on her sides." 

" Endymion " is, perhaps, partly responsible for this 
exaggeration of the picturesque; and in Swinburne, as 
in Keats, the habit is due to an excessive impressibility 
by all forms of sensuous beauty. It is a sign of riches, 
but of riches which smother their possessor. It is im- 
possible to fancy Chaucer or Goethe, or any large, healthy 
mind dealing thus by its theme. Or, indeed, contrast 
the whole passage from " At Eleusis " with the mention 
of the rape of Proserpine in the " Winter's Tale " and 
in "Paradise Lost." 

Another Pre-Raphaelite trait is that over-intensity of 
spirit and sense which was not quite wholesome in Ros- 
setti, but which manifested itself in Swinburne in a 



The Tre-^apbaelites. 343 

morbid eroticism. The first series of " Poems and Bal- 
lads" was reprinted in America as "Laus Veneris." 
The name-poem was a version of the Tannhauser legend, 
a powerful but sultry study of animal passion, and it set 
the key of the whole volume. It is hardly necessary to 
say of the singer of the wonderful choruses in " Atalanta " 
and the equally wonderful hexameters of " Hesperia," 
that his imagination has turned most persistently to the 
antique, and that a very small share of his work is to be 
brought under any narrowly romantic formula. But there 
are a few noteworthy experiments in mediaevalism in- 
cluded among these early lyrics. " A Christmas Carol " 
is a ballad of burdens, suggested by a drawing of Ros- 
setti's, and full of the Pre-Raphaelite colour. The in- 
evitable damsels, or bower maidens, are combing out the 
queen's hair with golden combs, while she sings a song 
of God's mother; how she, too, had three women for her 
bed-chamber — 

"The first two were the two Maries, 
The third was Magdalen, " * 

who "was the likest God"; and how Joseph, who, like- 
wise had three workmen, Peter, Paul, and John, said to 
the Virgin in regular ballad style: 

"If your child be none other man's. 
But if it be very mine, 
The bedstead shall be gold two spans, 
The bedfoot silver fine." 

*" Where the lady Mary is, 

With her five handmaidens whose names 
Are five sweet symphonies, 

Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen, 
Margaret and Rosalys." 

— "The Blessed Damozel." 



344 <^ History of English ^Romanticism. 

"The Masque of Queen Bersabe" is a miracle play, 
and imitates the rough tidivet^ of the old Scriptural drama, 
with its grotesque stage directions and innocent an- 
achronisms. Nathan recommends King David to hear a 
mass. All the dramatis perso?ice swear by Godis rood, by 
Paulis head, and Peter's soul, except " Secundus Miles " 
{^Paganus guidam), a bad man — a species of Vice — who 
swears by Satan and Mahound, and is finally carried off 
by the comic devil : 

" S. M. I rede you in the devil's name, 

Ye come not here to make men game ; 
By Termagaunt that maketh grame, 
I shall to-bete thine head. 
Hie Diabolus capiat eum. " * 

Similarly " St. Dorothy " reproduces the childlike faith 
and simplicity of the old martyrologies.f Theophilus ad- 
dresses the Emperor Gabaluswith "Beau Sire, Dieu vous 
aide." The wicked Gabalus himself, though a heathen, 
curses by St. Luke and by God's blood and bones, and 
quotes Scripture. Theophilus first catches sight of 
Dorothy through a latticed window, holding a green and 
red psalter among a troop of maidens who play upon 
short-stringed lutes. The temple of Venus where he does 
his devotions is a " church " with stained-glass windows. 
Heaven is a walled pleasance, like the Garden of De- 
light in the " Roman de la Rose," 

"Thick with companies 
Of fair-clothed men that play on shawms and lutes." 

Swinburne has also essayed the minstrel ballad in vari- 
ous forms. There were some half-dozen pieces of the 

* Cf. Browning's "The Heretic's Tragedy," supra, p. 276. 
f This was the subject of Massinger's "Virgin Martyr." 



The Tre-'^phaelites. 345 

sort in the " Laus Veneris " volume, of which several, 
like "The King's Daughter " and "The Sea-Swallows," 
were imitations of Rossetti's and Morris' imitations, ar- 
tistically overwrought with elaborate Pre-Raphaelite re- 
frains; others, like "May Janet" and "The Bloody 
Son," are closer to popular models. The third series of 
"Poems and Ballads" (1889) contains nine of these in 
the Scotch dialect, two of them Jacobite songs. That 
Swinburne has a fine instinct in such matters and holds 
the true theory of ballad imitation is evident from his 
review of Rossetti's and Morris' work in the same kind.* 
"The highest form of ballad requires, from a poet," he 
writes, " at once narrative power, lyrical and dramatic, 
. , , It must condense the large, loose fluency of roman- 
tic tale-telling into tight and intense brevity. , . , There 
can be no pause in a ballad, and no excess; nothing that 
flags, nothing that overflows." He pronounces " Sister 
Helen" the greatest ballad in modern English; but he 
thinks that " Stratton Water," which is less independent 
in composition, and copies the formal as well as the es- 
sential characteristics of popular poetry, is " a study after 
the old manner too close to be no closer. It is not 
meant for a perfect and absolute piece of work in the old 
Border fashion, , , , and yet it is so far a copy that it 
seems hardly well to have gone so far and no farther. 
On this ground Mr. Morris has a firmer tread than the 
great artist by the light of whose genius and kindly guid- 
ance he put forth the first fruits of his work, as I did 
afterwards. In his first book, the ballad of ' Welland 
River,' the Christmas carol in ' The Land East of the 
Sun and West of the Moon,' etc., ... are examples of 
*" Essays and Studies," pp. 85-88. 



346 (vf History of English l^pmanticism. 

flawless work in the pure early manner. Any less abso- 
lute and decisive revival of mediaeval form . . . rouses 
some sense of failure by excess or default of resem- 
blance." 

Swinburne's own ballads are clever and learned experi- 
ments, but he does not practise the brevity which he 
recommends; some of them, such as "The Bloody Son," 
"The Weary Wedding," and "The Bride's Tragedy," 
otherwise most impressive, would be more so if they were 
shorter or less wordy. Though his genius is more lyrical 
than dramatic, the fascination which the dramatic method 
has had for him from the first is as evident in his bal- 
lads as in his series of verse dramas, which begins with 
" The Queen Mother," and includes the enormous " Mary 
Stuart " trilogy. Several of these are mediaeval in sub- 
ject; the "Rosamond" of his earliest volume — Fair 
Rosamond of the Woodstock Maze — the other " Rosa- 
mund, Queen of the Goths" (1899) in which the period 
of the action is 573 a.d. ; and "Locrine" (1888), the 
hero of which is that mythic king of Britain whose story 
had been once before dramatised for the Elizabethan 
stage; and whose dailghler»JlSabrina fair," goddess of 
the Severn, figures in " Comus ." But these are no other- 
wise romantic than " Chastelard " or " The Queen 
Mother." The dramatic diction is fashioned after the 
Elizabethans, of whom Swinburne has been an enthusi- 
astic student and expositor, finding an attraction even in 
the morbid horrors of Webster, Ford, and Tourneur.* 

Once more the poet touched the Round-Table romances 

*See "A Study of Ben Jonson " ; "John Ford" (in "Essays 
and Studies ") ; and the introductions to " Chapman " and 
"Middleton " in the Mermaid Series. 



The 'Pre-'T^aphaelites. 347 

in "The Tale of Balen " (1896), written in the stanza of 
"The Lady of Shalott," and in a style simpler and more 
direct than " Tristram of Lyonesse." The story is the 
same as Tennyson's "Balin and Balan," published with 
"Tiresias and Other Poems" in 1885, as an introduction 
to "Merlin and Vivien." Here the advantage is in 
every point with the younger poet. Tennyson's version 
is one of the weakest spots in the " Idylls." His hero is 
a rough Northumberland warrior who looks with admira- 
tion upon the courtly graces of Lancelot, and borrows a 
cognisance from Guinevere to wear upon his shield, in 
hope that it may help him to keep his temper. But hav- 
ing once more lost control of this, he throws himself 
upon the ground 

"Moaning ' My violences, my violences !' " — 

a bathetic descent not unexampled elsewhere in Tennyson. 
This episode of the old " Morte Darthur " has fine 
tragic possibilities. It is the tale of two brothers who 
meet in single combat, with visors down, and slay each 
other unrecognised. It has some resemblance, therefore, 
to the plan of " Sohrab and Rustum," but it cannot be 
said that either poet avails himself of the opportunity for 
a truly dramatic presentation of his theme. Tennyson, 
as we have seen, aimed to give epic unity to the wander- 
ing and repetitious narrative of Malory, by selecting and 
arranging his material with reference to one leading con- 
ception ; the effort of the king to establish a higher social 
state through an order of Christian knighthood, and his 
failure through the gradual corruption of the Round 
Table. He subdues the history of Balin to this purpose, 
just as he does the history of Tristram which he relates 



348 <v^ History of English l^manticism. 

incidentally only, and not for its own sake, in "The Last 
Tournament." Balin's simple faith in the ideal chivalry 
of Arthur's court is rudely dispelled when he hears from 
Vivien, and sees for himself, that the two chief objects of 
his reverence, Lancelot and the queen, are guilty lovers 
and false to their lord; and in his bitter disappointment, 
he casts his life away in the first adventure that offers. 
Moreover, in consonance with his main design, Tenny- 
son seeks, so far as may be, to discard whatever in 
Malory is merely accidental or irrational ; whatever is 
stuff of romance rather than of epic or drama — whose 
theatre is the human will. To such elements of the 
wonderful as he is obliged to retain he gives, where pos- 
sible, an allegorical or spiritual significance. There are 
very strange things in the story of Balin, such as the in- 
visible knight Garlon, a "darkling manslayer"; and the 
chamber in the castle of King Pellam, where the body of 
Joseph of Arimathea lies in state, and where there are a 
portion of the blood of Christ and the spear with which 
his heart was pierced; with which spear Sir Balin smites 
King Pellam, whereupon the castle falls and the two ad- 
versaries lie among its ruins three days in a deathlike 
trance. All this wild magic — ^which Tennyson touches 
lightly — Swinburne gives at full length ; following Malory 
closely through his digressions and the roving adventures 
— most of which Tennyson suppresses entirely — by which 
he conducts his hero to his end. This is the true roman- 
tic method. 

As Rossetti for the Italian and Morris for the Scandi- 
navian, Swinburne stands for the spirit of French roman- 
ticism. At the beginning of the nineteenth century 
France, the inventor of "Gothic" architecture and chiv- 



The 7^re-%aphaelites. 349 

airy romance, whose literature was the most influential 
of mediaeval Europe, still represented everything that is 
most anti-mediaeval and anti-romantic. Gerard de Nerval 
thought that the native genius of France had been buried 
under two ages of imported classicism ; and that Per- 
rault, who wrote the fairy tales, was the only really orig- 
inal mind in the French literature of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. M. Brunetiere, on the contrary, holds that the true 
expression of the national genius is to be found in the 
writers of Louis XIV. 's time — that France is instinctively 
and naturally classical. However this may be, in the 
history of the modern return to the past, French roman- 
ticism was the latest to awake. Somewhat of the chron- 
icles, fabliaux, and romances of old France had dribbled 
into England in translations;* but Swinburne was per- 
haps the first thoroughpaced disciple of the French ro- 
mantic school. Victor Hugo is the god of his idolatry, 
and he has chanted his praise in prose and verse, in 
"ode and elegy and sonnet. "f Gautier and Baudelaire 
have also shared his devotion.]; The French songs in 
"Rosamond" and " Chastelard " are full of romantic 
spirit. "Laus Veneris" follows a version of the tale 
given in Maistre Antoine Gaget's "Livre des grandes 
merveilles d'amour" (1530), in which the Venusberg is 
called "le mont Horsel"; and "The Leper," a very 

* Vtde supra, pp. 90, 109, 330, and vol. i., pp. 221-22, 301. 

f See especially "A Study of Victor Hugo" (1886) ; the ar- 
ticles on "L'Homme qui Rit " and "L'Annee Terrible" in 
"Essays and Studies" C1875) ; and on Hugo's posthumous 
writings in " Studies in Prose and Poetry" (1886) ; "To Vic- 
tor Hugo" in "Poems and Ballads" (first series) ; Ibid, (sec- 
ond series) ; "Victor Hugo in 1877," Ibid. 

tSee "Ave atque Vale" and the memorial verses in Eng- 
lish, French, and Latin on Gautier's death in "Poems and 
Ballads " (second series) . 



35° '^ History of English ^Romanticism. 

characteristic piece in the same collection, is founded 
on a passage in the "Grandes Chroniques de France" 
(1505). Swinburne introduced or revived in English 
verse a number of old French stanza forms, such as the 
ballade, the sestina, the rondel, which have since grown 
familiar in the hands of Dobson, Lang, Gosse, and 
others. In the second series of '* Poems and Ballads " 
(1878) he gave translations of ten of the ballads of that 
musical old blackguard 

"Villon, our sad, bad, glad, mad brother's name."* 

The range of Swinburne's intellectual interests has 
been wider than that of Rossetti and Morris. He is a 
classical scholar, who writes easily in Latin and Greek. 
Ancient mythology and modern politics divide his atten- 
tion with the romantic literatures of many times and 
countries. Rossetti made but one or two essays in prose 
criticism, and Morris viewed the reviewer's art with con- 
tempt. But Swinburne has contributed freely to critical 
literature, an advocate of the principles of romantic art 
in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as Cole- 
ridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt had been in the first. The man- 
ner of his criticism is not at all judicial. His prose is 
as lyrical as his verse, and his praise and blame both in 
excess — dithyrambic laudation or affluent billingsgate. 
In particular, he works the adjective "divine" so hard 
that it loses meaning. Yet stripped of its excited super- 
latives, and reduced to the cool temperature of ordinary 
speech, his critical work is found to be full of insight, 
and his judgment in matters of poetical technique almost 
always right. I may close this chapter with a few sen- 

*" A Ballad of Frangois Villon." Vz'iie supra, pp. 298-99. 



The Tre-%aphaelites. 351 

tences of his defence of retrospective literature.* "It is 
but waste of breath for the champions of the other party 
to bid us break the yoke and cast off the bondage of that 
past, leave the dead to bury their dead, and turn from 
the dust and rottenness of old-world themes, epic or 
romantic, classical or feudal, to face the age wherein we 
live. ... In vain, for instance, do the first poetess of 
England and the first poet of America agree to urge upon 
their fellows or their followers the duty of confronting 
and expressing the spirit and the secret of their own time, 
its meaning, and its need. ... If a poem cast in the 
mould of classic or feudal times, of Greek drama or medi- 
aeval romance, be lifeless and worthless, it is not because 
the subject or the form was ancient, but because the poet 
was inadequate. . . . For neither epic nor romance of 
chivalrous quest or classic war is obsolete yet, or ever 
can be; there is nothing in the past extinct . . . [Life] 
is omnipresent and eternal, and forsakes neither Athens 
nor Jerusalem, Camelot nor Troy, Argonaut nor Cru- 
sader, to dwell, as she does with equal good will, among 
modem appliances in London and New York." 

*" Essays and Studies," pp. 45-49- 



CHAPTER VIII. 
tendencies anD "Vieeulte, 

It has been mentioned that romanticism was not purely 
a matter of aesthetics, without relation to the movement 
of religious and political thought.* But it has also been 
pointed out that, as compared with what happened in 
Germany, English romanticism was almost entirely a lit- 
erary or artistic, and hardly at all a practical force; that 
there was no such Zusanimenhang between poetry and 
life as was asserted by the German romantic school to 
be one of their leading principles. Walter Scott, e.g.^ 
liked the Middle Ages because they were picturesque; 
because their social structure rested on a military basis, 
permitted great individual freedom of action and even 
lawlessness, and thus gave chances for bold adventure; 
and because classes and callings were so sharply differ- 
entiated — each with its own characteristic manners, dia- 
lect, dress — that the surface of society presented a rich 
variety of colour, in contrast with the drab uniformity 
of modern life. Perhaps to Scott the ideal life was that 
of a feudal baron, dwelling in a Gothic mansion, sur- 
rounded by retainers and guests, keeping open house, and 
going a-hunting; and he tried to realise this ideal — so 
far as it was possible under modern conditions — at Ab- 
botsford. He respected rank and pedigree, and liked to 

*See vol. i., pp. 31-32. 

352 



Tendencies and Insults. 353 

own land. He was a Tory and, in Presbyterian Scot- 
land, he was an Episcopalian. But his mediaeval enthu- 
siasms were checked by all kinds of good sense. He 
had no wish to restore mediaeval institutions in practice, 
In spite of the glamour which he threw over feudal life, 
he knew very well what that life must have been in real- 
ity : its insecurity from violence and oppression, its bar- 
barous discomfort; the life of nobles in unplumbed stone 
castles; the life of burghers in walled towns, without 
lighting, drainage, or police; the life of countrymen who 
took their goods to market over miry roads impassable 
half the year for any wheeled vehicle. As to the Eng- 
lish poets whom we have passed in review, from Cole- 
ridge to Swinburne, not one of them joined the Catholic 
Church; and most of them found romantic literary tastes 
quite consistent with varying shades of political liberal- 
ism and theological heterodoxy. 

The Anglo-Catholic Movement. — Still even in Eng- 
land, the mediaeval revival in art and letters was not 
altogether without influence on practice and belief in 
other spheres of thought. Thus the Oxford Tractarians of 
1833 correspond somewhat to the throne-and-altar party 
in Germany. At Newcastle in 1845, William Bell Scott 
visited a painted-glass manufactory where he found his 
friend, Francis Oliphant — afterwards husband of Marga- 
ret Oliphant, the novelist — engaged as a designer. He 
describes Oliphant as no artist by nature, but a man 
of pietistic feelings who had "thrown himself into the 
Gothic revival which was, under the Oxford movement, 
threatening to become a serious antagonist to our present 
freedom from clerical domination." Scott adds that the 
master of this glass-making establishment was an un- 



354 <^ History of English 'Romanticism. 

cultivated tradesman, who yet had the business shrewd- 
ness to take advantage of "the clerical and architectural 
proclivities of the day," and had visited and studied the 
French cathedrals, " These workshops were a surprise 
to me. Here was the Scotch Presbyterian working-artist, 
with a short pipe in his mouth, cursing his fate in having 
to elaborate continual repetitions of saints and virgins — 
Peter with a key as large as a spade, and a yellow plate 
behind his head — yet by constant drill in the groove 
realising the sentiment of Christian art, and at last able 
to express the abnegation of self, the limitless sadness 
and even tenderness, in every line of drapery and every 
twist of the lay figure." 

Here is one among many testimonies to the influence 
of the Oxford movement on the fine arts. It would be 
r easy to call witnesses to prove the reverse — the influence 
' of romance upon the Oxford movement. Newman * 
quotes an article contributed by him to the British Critic 
for April, 1839, in which he had spoken of Tractarian- 
ism "as a reaction from the dry and superficial character 
>^ of the religious teaching and the literature of the last 
generation, or century. . . . First, I mentioned the liter- 
ary influence of Walter Scott, who turned men's minds to 
the direction of the Middle Ages. ' The general need,' I 
said, ' of something deeper and more attractive than what 
had offered itself elsewhere may be considered to have 
led to his popularity; and by means of his popularity he 
reacted on his readers, stimulating their mental thirst, 
feeding their hopes, setting before them visions which, 
when once seen, are not easily forgotten, and silently in- 
doctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might after- 
*" Apologia pro Vita Sua," p. 139. 



tendencies and %esults. 355 

wards be appealed to as first principles.' " Of Coleridge 
he spoke, in the same paper, as having laid a philosoph- 
ical basis for church feelings and opinions; and of 
Southey and Wordsworth as "two living poets, one of 
whom in the department of fantastic fiction, the other in 
that of philosophical meditation, have addressed them- 
selves to the same high principles and feelings, and car- 
ried forward their readers in the same direction." New- 
man, like Ruskin, was fond of Scott's verse as well as of 
his prose.* 

Professor Gates has well recognised that element in 
romantic art which affiliates with Catholic tendencies. 
"Mediaevalism . . . was a distinctive note of the Ro- 
mantic spirit, and, certainly, Newman was intensely alive 
to the beauty and the poetic charm of the life of the 
Middle Ages. One is sometimes tempted to describe 
him as a great mediaeval ecclesiastic astray in the nine- 
teenth century and heroically striving to remodel modern 
life in harmony with his temperamental needs. His im- 
agination was possessed with the romantic vision of the 
greatness of the Mediaeval Church — of its splendour and 
pomp and dignity, and of its power over the hearts and 
lives of its members ; and the Oxford movement was in 
its essence an attempt to reconstruct the English Church 

*"It would require the . . . magic pen of Sir Walter to 
catalogue and to picture . . . that most miserable proces- 
sion " ("Callista: a Sketch of the Third Century," 1855; 
chapter, " Christianos ad Leones ") . It is curious to compare 
this tale of the early martyrs, Newman's solitary essay in 
historical romance, with "Hypatia." It has the intellectual 
refinement of everything that came from its author's pen ; and 
it has strong passages like the one describing the invasion of 
the locusts. But. upon the whole, Newman was as inferior to 
Kingsley as a novelist as he was superior to him in the dia- 
lectics of controversy. 



356 c/^ History of English Romanticism. 

J in harmony with this romantic ideal. ... As Scott's im- 
agination was fascinated with the picturesque parapher- 
nalia of feudalism — with its jousts, and courts of love, and 
its coats of mail and buff-jerkins — ^so Newman's imagi- 
nation was captivated by the gorgeous ritual and ceremo- 
nial, the art and architecture of mediaeval Christianity. 
. . . Newman sought to revive in the Church a mediae- 
val faith in its own divine mission and the intense 
spiritual consciousness of the Middle Ages; he aimed 
to restore to religion its mystical character, to exalt the 
sacramental system as the divinely appointed means for 
the salvation of souls, and to impose once more on men's 
imaginations the mighty spell of a hierarchical organi- 
sation, the direct representative of God in the world's 
affairs. . . . Both he and Scott substantially ruined 
themselves through their mediaevalism. Scott's luckless 
attempt was to place his private and family life upon a 
feudal basis and to give it mediaeval colour and beauty; 
Newman undertook a much nobler and more heroic but 
more intrinsically hopeless task — that of re-creating the 
whole English Church in harmony with mediaeval con- 
ceptions." * 

All this is most true, and yet it is easy to exaggerate 
the share which romantic feeling had in the Oxford 
movement. In his famous apostrophe to Oxford, Mat- 
thew Arnold personifies the university as a " queen of 
romance," an " adorable dreamer whose heart has been so 
romantic," " spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and 
whispering from her towers the last enchantments of 
the Middle Age," and " ever calling us nearer to . . . 

*See the entire section "Selections from Newman," by 
^^ Lewis PI Gates, New York, 1895. Introduction, pp. xlvi-lix. 



Tendencies and Insults. 357 

beauty." Newman himself was a poet, as well as one of 
the masters of English prose. The movement left an 
impress upon general literature in books like Keble's 
"Christian Year" (1827) and "Lyra Innocentium " 
(1847) ; ^" Newman's two novels, " Callista " and "Loss 
and Gain" (1848), and his "Verses on Various Occa- 
sions" (1867); and even found an echo in popular fic- 
tion. Grey in Hughes' "Tom Brown at Oxford " repre- 
sents the Puseyite set. Miss Yonge's " Heir of Redcliffe " 
and Shorthouse's "John Inglesant" are surcharged with 
High-Church sentiment. Newman said that Keble made 
the Church of England poetical. " The author of ' The 
Christian Year ' found the Anglican system all but des- 
titute of this divine element [poetry]; , . . vestments 
chucked off, lights quenched, jewels stolen, the pomp 
and circumstances of worship annihilated; . . . the royal 
arms for the crucifix; huge ugly boxes of wood, sacred to 
preachers, frowning on the congregation in place of the 
mysterious altar; and long cathedral aisles unused, railed 
off, like the tombs (as they were) of what had been and 
was not." * Newman praises in " The Christian Year " 
what he calls its " sacramental system " ; and to the un- 
sympathetic reader it seems as though Keble saw all 
outdoors through a stained-glass window. The move- 
ment had its aesthetic side, and coincided with the revival 
of church Gothic and with the effort to make church 
music and ritual richer and more impressive. But, upon 
the whole, it was more intellectual than aesthetic, an 
affair of doctrine and church polity rather than of eccle- 
siology; while the later phase of ritualism into which it 
has tapered down appears to the profane to be largely a 
*" Essays Critical and Historical" (1846). 



35^ <tA History of English 1{omanticism. 

matter of upholstery, given over to people who concern 
themselves with the carving of lecterns and the embroid- 
ery of chasubles and altar cloths ; with Lent lilies, antiph- 
onal choirs, and what Carlyle calls the " singular old 
rubrics" of the English Church and the "three surplices 
at All-Hallowmas," 

Newman was, above all things, a theologian ; a subtle 
reasoner whose relentless logic led him at last to Rome. 
" From the age of fifteen," he wrote, " dogma has been 
the fundamental principle of my religion; I know no 
other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other 
sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me 
a dream and a mockery." Discussions concerning church 
ceremonies, liturgy, ritual, he put aside with some im- 
patience. His own tastes were simple to asceticism. 
Mozley says that Newman and Hurrell Froude induced 
several of the Oriel fellows to discontinue the use of 
wine in the common room. " When I came up at 
Easter, 1825, one of the first standing jokes against the 
college all over the university was the Oriel tea-pot." * 
Dean Church testifies to the plainness of the services at 
St. Mary's.f Aubrey de Vere reports his urging New- 
man to make an expedition with him among the Wicklow 
Mountains, and the latter's " answering with a smile that 
life was full of work more important than the enjoyment 
of mountains and lakes. . . . The ecclesiastical imagi- 
nation and the mountain-worshipping imagination are two 
very different things. Wordsworth's famous ' Tintern 
Abbey ' describes the river Wye, etc. . . . The one 
thing which it did not see was the great monastic ruin ; 

*" Reminiscences," Thomas Mozley, Boston, 1882. 
f "Life and Letters of Dean Church," London, 1894. 



Tendencies and Insults. 359 

. . . and now here is this great theologian, who, when 
within a few miles of Glendalough Lake, will not visit 
it."* 

There is much gentle satire in " Loss and Gain " at 
the expense of the Ritualistic set in the university who 
were attracted principally by the external beauty of the 
Roman Catholic worship. One of these is Bateman, a 
solemn bore, who takes great interest in "candlesticks, 
ciboriums, faldstools, lecterns, ante-pendiums, piscinas, 
roodlofts, and sedilia " : wears a long cassock which 
shows absurdly under the tails of his coat; and would 
tolerate no architecture but Gothic in English churches, 
and no music but the Gregorian. Bateman is having a 
chapel restored in pure fourteenth-century style and dedi- 
cated to the Royal Martyr. He is going to convert the 
chapel into a chantry, and has bought land about it for 
a cemetery, which is to be decorated with mediaeval mon- 
uments in sculpture and painting copied from the frescoes 
in the Campo Santo at Pisa, of which he has a portfolio 
full of drawings. "It will be quite sweet," he says, "to 
hear the vesper-bell tolling over the sullen moor every 
evening." Then there is White, a weak young aesthete 
who shocks the company by declaring : " We have no life 
or poetry in the Church of England; the Catholic Church 
alone is beautiful. You would see what I mean if you 
went into a foreign cathedral, or even into one of the 
Catholic churches in our large towns. The celebrant, 
deacon and sub-deacon, acolytes with lights, the incense 
and the chanting all combine to one end, one act of 
worship." White is much exercised by the question 
whether a sacristan should wear the short or the long 
* "Recollections of Aubrey de Vere," London, 1897. 



360 c/f History of English ^{omanticism. 

cotta. But he finally marries and settles down into a fat 
preferment. 

Newman's sensitiveness to the beauty of Catholic re- 
*'' ligion is acute. " Her very being is poetry," he writes. 
But equally acute is his sense of the danger under which 
religion lies from the ministration of the arts, lest they 
cease to be handmaids, and '* give the law to Religion." 
Hence he praises, from an ecclesiastical point of view, 
the service of the arts in their rudimental state — the rude 
Gothic sculpture, the simple Gregorian chant.* A simi- 
lar indifference to the merely aesthetic aspects of Cathol- 
icism is recorded of many of Newman's associates; of 
Hurrell Froude, e.g., and of Ward. When Pugin came 
to Oxford in 1840 to superintend some building at Bal- 
liol, he saw folio copies of St. Buonaventura and Aquinas' 
" Summa Theologiae " lying on Ward's table, and ex- 
claimed, " What an extraordinary thing that so glorious 
a man as Ward should be living in a room without mul- 
lions to the windows ! " This being reported to Ward, he 
asked, "What are mullions? I never heard of them." 
Ward cared nothing about rood-screens and lancet win- 
dows; Newman and Faber preferred the Palladian archi- 
tecture to the Gothic.t Pugin, on the other hand, who 
had been actually converted to the Roman Church through 

*"Ideaof a University" (1852). See also in "Parochial 
and Plain Sermons " the discourse on "The Danger of Accom- 
plishments, " and that on "The Gospel Palaces." In the lat- 
ter he writes, speaking of the cathedrals : " Unhappy they 
who, while they have eyes to admire, admire them only for 
their beauty's sake ; . . . who regard them as works of art, 
not fruits of grace." 

f Cardinal Wiseman had a decided preference for Renais- 
sance over Gothic, and the churches built under his authority 
were mostly in Italian styles. 



Tendencies and Insults. 361 

his enthusiasm for pointed architecture; and who, when 
asked to dinner, stipulated for Gothic puddings, for 
which he enclosed designs, was greatly distressed at the 
carelessness about such matters which he found at Ox- 
ford. A certain Dr. Cox was going to pray for the con- 
version of England, in an old French cope. " What is 
the use," asked Pugin, " of praying for the Church of 
England in that cope.' " * 

Of the three or four hundred Anglican clergymen who 
went over with Newman in 1845, ^^ some years later 
with Manning, on the decision in the Gorham contro- 
versy, few were influenced in any assignable degree by 
poetic motives. "As regards my friend's theory about 
my imaginative sympathies having led me astray," writes 
Aubrey de Vere, " I may remark that they had been re- 
pelled, not attracted, by what I thought an excess of cere- 
monial in the churches and elsewhere when in Italy. 
... It seemed to me too sensuous." f Indeed, at the 
outset of the movement it was not the mediaeval Church, 
but the primitive Church, the Church of patristic discipline 
and doctrine, that appealed to the Tractarians. It was 
the Anglican Church of the seventeenth century, the 
Church of Andrewes and Herbert and Ken, to which 
Keble sought to restore the " beauty of holiness " ; and 
those of the Oxford party who remained within the estab-/ 
lishment continued true to this ideal. "The Christian 
Year" is the genuine descendant of George Herbert's 
"Temple" (1632). What impressed Newman's imagi- 
nation in the Roman Catholic Church was not so much the 

*" William George Ward and the Oxford Movement," Lon- 
don, 1889, pp. 153-55- 
f " Recollections, " p. 309. 



362 e/^ History of English %omanticism. 

romantic beauty of its rites and observances as its im- 
posing unity and authority. He wanted an authoritative 
standard in matters of belief, a faith which had been 
held semper et ubique et ab omnibus. The English Church 
was an Elizabethan compromise. It was Erastian, a 
creature of the state, threatened by the Reform Bill of 
1832, threatened by every liberal wind of opinion. The 
Thirty-nine Articles meant this to one man and that to an- 
other, and there was no court of final appeal to say what 
they meant. Newman was a convert not of his imagina- 
tion, but of his longing for consistency and his desire to 
believe. 

There is nothing romantic in either temper or style 
about Newman's poems, all of which are devotional in 
subject, and one of which — "The Pillar of the Cloud" 
("Lead, Kindly Light") (1833) — is a favourite hymn in 
most Protestant communions. The most ambitious of 
these is "The Dream of Gerontius," a sort of mystery 
play which Sir Henry Taylor used to compare with the 
" Divine Comedy." Indeed, none but Dante has more 
poignantly expressed the purgatorial passion, the desire 
for pain, which makes the spirits in the flames of purifi- 
cation unwilling to intermit their torments even for a 
moment. The " happy, suffering soul " of Gerontius lies 
before the throne of the Crucified and sings : 

"Take me away, and in the lowest deep 
There let me be. 
And there in hope the lone night-watches keep 
Told out for me. " * 

* Frederick William Faber, one of the Oxford men who 
went over with Newman in 1845, and became Superior of the 
Orator J' of St. Philip Neri, was a religious poet of some dis- 
tinction. A collection of his hymns was published in 1862. 



Tendencies and Insults. 363 

Some dozen years before the " Tracts for the Times " 
began to appear at Oxford, a sporadic case of conversion 
at the sister university offers a closer analogy with the 
catholicising process among the German romantics. 
Kenelm Henry Digby, who took his degree at Trinity] 
College in 18 19, and devoted himself to the study of' 
mediaeval antiquities and scholastic philosophy, was 
actually led into the Catholic fold by his enthusiasm for 
the chivalry romances, as Pugin was by his love of GothiC- 
architecture. His singular book, "The Broad Stone of 
Honour," was first published in 1822, and repeatedly 
afterwards in greatly enlarged form. In its final edition 
it consists of four books entitled respectively " Godefri- 
dus," "Tancredus," "Morus" (Sir Thomas More), and 
"Orlandus," after four representative paladins of Chris- 
tian chivalry. The title of the whole work was suggested 
by the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, the "Gibraltar of the 
Rhine." Like Fouque, Digby was inspired by the ideal 
of knighthood, but he emphasises not so much the gal- 
lantry of the knight-errant as his religious character as 
the champion of Holy Church. The book is, loosely 
speaking, an English "Genie du Christianisme," less 
brilliantly rhetorical than Chateaubriand, but more sin- 
cerely devout. It is poetic and descriptive rather than 
polemical, though the author constantly expresses his 
dislike of modern civilisation, and complains with Burke 
that this is an age of sophists, calculators, and econo- 
mists. He quotes profusely from German and French 
reactionaries, like Busching,* Fritz Stolberg, Gorres, 
Friedrich Schlegel, Lamennais, and Joseph de Maistre; 
and illustrates his topic at every turn from mediaeval 
♦"Ritterzeit und Ritterwesen." 



364 <i/J History of English l^otnanticism. 

chronicles, legendaries, romances, and manuals of chiv- 
alry ; from the lives of Charlemagne, St. Louis, Godfrey 
of Bouillon, the Chevalier Bayard, St. Anselm, King 
Rene, etc., and above all, from the " Morte Darthur." He 
defends the Crusades, the Templars, and the monastic 
orders against such historians as Muller, Sismondi, and 
Hume; is very contemptuous of the Protestant conces- 
sions of Bishop Hurd's " Letters on Chivalry and Ro- 
mance " ; * and, in short, fights a brave battle against the 
artillery of "the moderns" vi^ith weapons borrowed from 
"the armoury of the invincible knights of old." The 
book is learned, though unsystematic and discursive, but 
its most interesting feature is its curiously personal note, 
its pure spirit of honour and Catholic piety. The en- 
thusiasm of the author extends itself from the institutes 
of chivalry and the Church to the social and political 
constitution of the Middle Ages. He is anti-democratic 
as well as anti-Protestant; upholds monarchy, nobility, 
the interference of the popes in the affairs of kingdoms, 
and praises the times when the doctrines of legislation 
and government all over Europe rested on the founda- 
tions of the Church. 

A few paragraphs from " The Broad Stone of Honour " 
will illustrate the author's entrance into the Church 
through the door of beauty, and his identification of ro- 
mantic art with " the art Catholic." " It is much to be 
lamented," he writes, "that the acquaintance of the 
English reader with the characters and events of the 
Middle Ages should, for the most part, be derived from 
the writings of men who were either infidels, or who wrote 
on every subject connected with religion, with the feel- 
*See vol. i., pp. 221-26. 



Tendencies and Insults. 365 

ings and opinions of Scotch Presbyterian preachers of 
the last century." * "A distinguishing characteristic of 
everything belonging to the early and Middle Ages of 
Christianity is the picturesque. Those who now strug- 
gle to cultivate the fine arts are obliged to have recourse 
to the despised, and almost forgotten, houses, towns, and 
dresses of this period. As soon as men renounced the 
philosophy of the Church, it was inevitable that their 
taste, that the form of objects under their control, should 
change with their religion; for architects had no longer 
to provide for the love of solitude, of meditation between 
sombre pillars, of modesty in apartments with the lancet- 
casement. They were not to study duration and solidity 
in an age when men were taught to regard the present as 
their only concern. When nothing but exact knowledge 
was sought, the undefined sombre arches were to be re- 
moved to make way for lines which would proclaim their 
brevity, and for a blaze of light which might correspond 
with the mind of those who rejected every proposition 
that led beyond the reach of the senses. ... So com- 
pletely is it beyond the skill of the painter or the poet 
to render bearable the productions of the moderns, . . . 
and so fast are the poor neglected works of Christian 
antiquity falling to ruin, that it is hard to conceive how 
the fine arts can be cultivated after another century has 
elapsed; for when children are taught in infant schools 
to love accounts from their cradle, and to study political 
economy before they have heard of the Red Cross Knight 
or the Wild Hunter, the manner and taste of such an age 
will smother the sparks of nature." f The Church sum- 



*Vol. ii.. p. 44 (ed. 1846). 
\lbid., pp. 315-16- 



366 z/1 History of English Romanticism. 

moned all natural beauty to the ministry of religion. 
"Flowers bloomed on the altars; men could behold the 
blue heaven through those tall, narrow-pointed eastern 
windows of the Gothic choir as they sat at vespers. . . . 
The cloud of incense breathed a sweet perfume; the 
voice of youth was tuned to angelic hymns; and the 
golden sun of the morning, shining through the coloured 
pane, cast its purple or its verdant beam on the embroid- 
ered vestments and marble pavement." * Or read the 
extended rhapsody which closes the first volume, where, 
to counteract the attractions of classic lands, the author 
passes in long review the sites and monuments of ro- 
mance in England, Germany, Spain, Italy, and France. 
Aubrey de Vere says that nothing had been so " impres- 
sive, suggestive, and spiritually helpful " to him as New- 
man's "Lectures on Anglican Difficulties" (1850), "with 
the exception of the ' Divina Commedia ' and Kenelm 
Digby's wholly uncontroversial ' Mores Catholici ' " 
(1831-40). 

The Study of Mediaeval Art. — The correlation of 
romantic poetry, Catholic worship, and mediaeval art has 
been indicated in the chapter upon the Pre-Raphaelites, 
as well as in the foregoing section of the present chapter. 
But the three departments have other tangential points 
which should not pass without some further mention. 
The revival of Gothic architecture which began with 
Horace Walpole f went on in an unintelligent way through 
the eighteenth century. One of the queerest monuments 
of this new taste — a successor on a larger scale to Straw- 
berry Hill — was Fonthill Abbey, near Salisbury, that 

* Ibid., p. 350. 

f See vol. i., chap, vii., "The Gothic Revival." 



Tendencies and 'Results. 367 

prodigious folly to which Beckford, the eccentric author 
of " Vathek," devoted a great share of his almost fabu- 
lous wealth. It was begun in 1796, took nearly thirty 
year> in building, employed at one time four hundred 
and sixty men, and cost over ^^273, 000. Its most con- 
spicuous feature was an octagonal tower 278 feet high, so 
ill constructed that it shortly tumbled down into a heap 
of ruins.* 

The growing taste for mediaeval architecture was pow- 
erfully reinforced by the popularity of Water Scott's 
writings. But Abbotsford is evidence enough of the 
superficiality of his own knowledge of the art; and dur- 
ing the first half of the nineteenth century, Gothic design 
was applied not to churches, but to the more ambitious 
classes of domestic architecture. The country houses of 
the nobility and landed gentry were largely built or re- 
built in what was known as the castellated style, f Mean- 
while a truer understanding of the principles of pointed 
architecture was being helped by the publication of 
archaeological works like Britton's "Cathedral Antiqui- 
ties" (1814-35), Milner's "Treatise on Ecclesiastical 
Architecture" (18 11), and Rickman's "Ancient Exam- 
ples of Gothic Architecture " (18 19). The parts of indi- 
vidual buildings, such as Westminster Abbey and Lin- 

* A view of Fonthill Abbey, as it appeared in 1822. is given 
in Fergusson's "History of Modern Architecture," vol. ii., 
p. 98 (third ed.). 

fFor Scott's influence on Gothic see Eastlake's "Gothic 
Revival," pp. 112-16. A typical instance of this castellated 
style in America was the old New York University in Wash- 
ington Square, built in the thirties. This is the " Chrysalis Col- 
lege " which Theodore Winthrop ridicules in " Cecil Dreeme " 
for its "mock-Gothic" pepper-box turrets, and "deciduous 
plaster." Fan traceries in plaster and window traceries in 
cast iron were abominations of this period. 



368 <iA History of English ^Romanticism. 

coin Cathedral, were carefully studied and illustrated 
with plans and sections drawn to scale ; and measurement 
was substituted for guesswork. But the real restorer of 
ecclesiastical Gothic in England was Augustus Welby 
Northmore Pugin, an enthusiast, nay, a fanatic, in the 
cause; whose "Contrasts" (1836) is not only a landmark 
in the history of the revival of mediaeval art, but a most 
instructive illustration of the manner in which an aes- 
thetic admiration of the Middle Ages has sometimes in- 
volved an acceptance of their religious beliefs and social 
principles. Three generations of this family are associ- 
ated with the rise of modern Gothic. The elder Pugin 
(Augustus Charles) was a French emigre, who came to 
England during the Revolution, and gained much reputa- 
tion as an architectural draughtsman, publishing, among 
other things, " Specimens of Gothic Architecture," in 
182 1. The son of A. W. N. Pugin, Edward Welby 
(1834-73), also carried on his father's work as a practi- 
cal architect and a writer. 

Pugin joined the Roman Catholic Church just about 
the time when the " Tracts for the Times " began to be 
issued. His "Contrasts: or a Parallel between the 
Architecture of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" 
is fiercely polemical, and displays all the zeal of a fresh 
convert. In the preface to the second edition he says 
that "when this work was first brought out [1836], the 
very name of Christian art was almost unknown " ; and 
he affirms, in a footnote, that in the whole of the national 
museum, " there is not even one room, one she{f, devoted 
to the exquisite productions of the Middle Ages." The 
book is a jeremiad over the condition to which the cathe- 
drals and other remains of English ecclesiastical archi- 



Tendencies and l^esults. 369 

tecture had been reduced by the successive spoliations 
and mutilations in the times of Henry VIII., Edward 
VI., and Cromwell, and by the "vile" restorations of 
later days. It maintains the thesis that pointed architec- 
ture is not only vastly superior artistically, but that it is 
the only style appropriate to Christian churches; *''in it 
alone we find the faith of Christianity embodied and its 
practices illustrated." Pugin denounces alike the Renais- 
sance and the Reformation, " those two monsters, revived 
Paganism and Protestantism." There is no chance, he 
thinks, for a successful revival of Gothic except in a re- 
turn to Catholic faith. " The mechanical part of Gothic 
architecture is pretty well understood, but it is the prin- 
ciples which influenced ancient compositions, and the 
soul which appears in all the former works, which is so 
lamentably deficient. . . . 'Tis they alone that can re- 
store pointed architecture to its former glorious state; 
without it all that is done will be a tame and heartless 
copy." He points out the want of sympathy between 
"these vast edifices" and the Protestant worship, which 
might as well be carried on in a barn or conventicle or 
square meeting-house. Hence, the nave has been blocked 
up with pews, the choir or transept partitioned off to serve 
as a parish church, roodloft and chancel screen removed, 
the altar displaced by a table, and the sedilia scattered 
about in odd corners. The contrast between old and 
new is strikingly presented, by way of object lessons, in 
a series of plates, arranged side by side, and devised 
with a great deal of satirical humour. There is, e.^. , a 
Catholic town in 1440, rich with its ancient stone bridge, 
its battlemented wall and city gate, and the spires and 
towers of St. Marie's Abbey, the Guild Hall, Queen's 



370 c/^ History of English 'Romanticism. 

Cross, St. Cuthbert's Church, and the half-timbered, 
steep-roofed, gabled houses of the burgesses. Over 
against it is the picture of the same town in 1840, hide- 
ous with the New Jail, Gas Works, Lunatic Asylum, 
Wesleyan Chapel, New Town Hall, Iron Works, Quaker 
Meeting-house, Socialist Hall of Science, and other 
abominations of a prosperous modern industrial commu- 
nity. Or there is the beautiful old western doorway of 
St. Mary Overies, destroyed in 1838. The door stands 
invitingly open, showing the noble interior with kneeling 
worshippers scattered here and there over the unob- 
structed pavement. Opposite is the new door, grimly 
closed, with a printed notice nailed upon it: "Divine 
Service on Sundays, Evening lecture." A separate 
plate exhibits a single compartment of the old door curi- 
ously carved in oak; and beside it a compartment of the 
new door in painted deal and plain as a pike-staff. 

But the author is forced to confess that the case is not 
much better in Catholic countries, where stained win- 
dows have been displaced by white panes, frescoed ceil- 
ings covered with a yellow wash, and the "bastard pagan 
style " introduced among the venerable sanctities of old 
religion. English travellers return from the Continent 
disgusted with the tinsel ornament and theatrical trum- 
peries that they have seen in foreign churches. " I do 
not think," he concludes, " the architecture of our Eng- 
lish churches would have fared much better under a 
Catholic hierarchy. ... It is a most melancholy truth 
that there does not exist much sympathy of idea between 
a great portion of the present Catholic body in England 
and their glorious ancestors. . . . Indeed, such is the 
total absence of solemnity in a great portion of modern 



Tendencies and Insults. 371 

Catholic buildings in England, that I do not hesitate to 
say that a few crumbling walls and prostrate arches of a 
religious edifice raised during the days of faith will 
convey a far stronger religious impression to the mind 
than the actual service of half the chapels in England." 

In short, Pugin's Catholicism, though doubtless sin- 
cere, was prompted by his professional feelings. His 
reverence was given to the mediaeval Church, not to her 
— aesthetically — degenerate daughter; and it extended to 
the whole system of life and thought peculiar to the Mid- 
dle Ages. " Men must learn," he wrote, " that the period 
hitherto called dark and ignorant far excelled our age in 
wisdom, that art ceased when it is said to have been re- 
vived, that superstition was piety, and bigotry faith." In 
many of his views Pugin anticipates Ruskin. He did 
not like St. Peter's at Rome, and said: " If those students 
who journey to Italy to study art would follow the steps 
of the great Overbeck,* . . . they would indeed derive 
inestimable benefit. Italian art of the thirteenth, four- 
teenth, and fifteenth centuries is the beau ideal of Chris- 
tian purity, and its imitation cannot be too strongly in- 
culcated; but when it forsook its pure, mystical, and 
ancient types, to follow those of sensual Paganism, it 
sunk to a fearful state of degradation." 

As a practising architect Pugin naturally received and 
executed many commissions for Catholic churches. But 
the Catholic Church in England did much less, even in 
proportion to its resources, than the Anglican establish- 
ment towards promoting the Gothic revival. Eastlake 
says that Pugin's "strength as an artist lay in the design 
of ornamental detail " ; and that he helped importantly in 
* Vi(ig stfpra, p. 153. 



372 a^ History of English 'T{omanticism . 

the revival of the mediaeval taste in stained glass, metal 
work, furniture, carpets, and paper-hangings. Several of 
his works have to do with various departments of eccle- 
siology; chancel-screens, roodlofts, church ornaments, 
symbols and costumes, and the like. But the only one 
that need here be mentioned is the once very influential 
" True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture " 
(1841). This revival of ecclesiastical Gothic fell in with 
the reform of Anglican ritual, which was one of the fea- 
tures or sequences of the Oxford movement, and the two 
tendencies afforded each other mutual support. 

Evidence of a newly awakened interest in mediaeval 
art is furnished by a number of works of a more syste- 
matic character which appeared about the middle of the 
century, dealing not only with architecture, but with the 
early schools of sculpture and painting. One of these 
was "Sketches of the History of Christian Art" (3 vols., 
1847) by Alexander William Crawford Lindsay, twenty- 
fifth Earl of Crawford. In the preface to the reprint of 
this book in 1885, Lady Crawford speaks of it as a 
pioneer in an " early time of unawakened interest." Rus- 
kin refers to it repeatedly — always with respect — and 
acknowledges in " Praeterita " that Lord Lindsay knew a 
great deal more about Italian art than he himself did. 
The book reviews in detail the works of Christian build- 
ers, sculptors and painters, both in Italy and north of 
the Alps, from the time of the Roman catacombs and 
basilicas down to the Renaissance. It gives likewise a 
history of Christian mythology, iconography and symbol- 
ism; all that great body of popular beliefs about angels, 
devils, saints, martyrs, anchorites, miracles, etc., which 
Protestant iconoclasm and the pagan spirit of the mique- 



Tendencies and '^stilts. 373 

eento had long ago swept into the dust-bin as sheer idol- 
atry and superstition. Lord Lindsay's treatment of these 
matters is reverential, though his own Protestantism is 
proof against their charm. His tone is moderate; he 
has no quarrel with the Renaissance, and professes re- 
spect for classical art, which seems to him, however, on 
a lower spiritual plane than the Christian. He remarks 
that all mediaeval art was religious; the only concession 
to the secular being found in the illuminations of some 
of the chivalry romances. Gothic architecture was the 
expression of Teutonic genius, which is realistic and 
stands for the reason, while Italian sacred painting was 
idealistic and stands for the imagination. In the most 
perfect art, as in the highest type of religion, reason and 
imagination are in balance. Hence, the influence of 
Van Eyck, Memling, and Diirer on Italian painters was 
wholesome; and the Reformation, the work of the rea- 
soning Teutonic mind, is not to be condemned. Reason 
is to blame only when it goes too far and extinguishes 
imagination.* 

"The sympathies of the North, or of the Teutonic 
race, are with Death, as those of the Southern, or classic, 
are with Life. , . . The exquisitely beautiful allegorical 
tale of ' Sintram and His Companions' by La Motte 
Fouque, was founded on the ' Knight and Death ' of 

*"A blast from the icy jaws of Reason, the wolf Fenris of 
the Teutonic mind, swept one and all into the Limbo of ob 
livion — that sole ante-chamber spared by Protestantism in 
spoiling Purgatory. Perhaps this was necessary and inevi- 
table. If we would repair the column, we must cut away the 
ivy that clings around the shaft, the flowers and brushwood 
that conceal the base ; but it does not follow that, when the 
repairs are completed, we should isolate it in a desert, — that 
the flowers and brushwood should not be allowed to grow up 
and caress it as before " (vol. ii., p. 380, second ed.). 



374 <^ History of English Romanticism. 

Albert Diirer, and I cannot but think that Milton had the 
' Melancholy ' in his remembrance while writing * II 
Penseroso.' " * The author thinks that, whatever may be 
true of Gothic architecture — an art less national than ec- 
clesiastical — " sculpture and painting, on the one hand, 
and the spirit of chivalry on the other, have usually flour- 
ished in an inverse ratio one to the other, and it is not 
therefore in England, France, or Spain, but among the 
free cities of Italy and Germany that we must look for 
their rise." f I give these conclusions — so opposite to 
those of Catholic mediaevalists like Digby and Pugin — 
because they illustrate the temper of Lindsay's book. 
One more quotation I will venture to add for its agree- 
ment with Uvedale Price's definition of the picturesque : | 
"The picturesque in art answers to the romantic in 
poetry ; both stand opposed to the classic or formal school 
— both may be defined as the triumph of nature over art, 
luxuriating in the decay, not of her elemental and ever- 
lasting beauty, but of the bonds by which she had been 
enthralled by man. It is only in ruin that a building 
of pure architecture, whether Greek or Gothic, becomes 
picturesque." § 

Lord Lindsay's " Sketches " contained no illustrations. 
Mrs. Jameson's very popular series on " Sacred and 
Legendary Art" was profusely embellished with wood- 
cuts and etchings. The first number of the series, "Leg- 
ends of the Saints and Martyrs," was begun in 1842, but 
issued only in 1848. " Legends of the Monastic Orders " 



*Vol. ii., p. 364, note; and vide supra, p. 152. 

\ Ibid., p. 289. 

i Vide supra, p. 34. 

%Ibid., p. 286, note. 



Tendencies and Results. 375 

followed in 1850; "Legends of the Madonna" in 1852; 
and the " History of Our Lord " (completed by Lady 
Eastlake) in i860. Mrs. Jameson had an imperfect 
knowledge of technique, and her work was descriptive 
rather than critical. But it probably did more to enlist 
the interest of the general reader in Christian art than 
Lord Lindsay's more learned volumes; or possibly even 
than the brilliant but puzzling rhetoric of Ruskin. 

With Pugin's " Contrasts " began the " Battle of the 
Styles." This was soon decided in Pugin's favour, so 
far as ecclesiastical buildings were concerned. Fergus- 
son, who is hostile to Gothic, admits that wherever cler- 
ical influence extended, the style came into fashion. The 
Cambridge Camden Society was founded in 1839 for the 
study of church architecture and ritual, and issued the 
first number of its magazine. The Ecclesiologist, in 1841. 
But the first national triumph for secular Gothic was won 
when Barry's design for the new houses of Parliament 
was selected from among ninety-seven competing plans. 
The corner-stone was laid at Westminster in 1840, and 
much of the detail, as the work went on, was furnished 
by Pugin. 

It was not long before the Gothic revival found an ally 
in the same great writer who had already come forward 
as the champion of Pre-Raphaelite painting. The mas- 
terly analysis of " The Nature of Gothic " in " The Stones 
of Venice" (vol. i., 1851; vols. ii. and iii., 1853), and 
the eloquence and beauty of a hundred passages through- 
out the three volumes, fascinated a public which cared 
little about art, but knew good literature when they saw 
it. Eastlake testifies that Ruskin had some practical in- 
fluence on English building. Young artists went to Venice 



376 f/i History of English ^{omanticism. 

to study the remains of Italian Gothic, and the results of 
their studies were seen in the surface treatment of many 
London facades, especially in the cusped window arches, 
and in the stripes of coloured bricks which give a zebra- 
like appearance to the architecture of the period. But, 
in general, working architects were rather contemptuous 
of Ruskin's fine-spun theories, which they ridiculed as 
fantastic, self -contradictory, and super-subtle; rhetoric 
or metaphysics, in short, and not helpful art criti- 
cism. 

Ruskin's adhesion to Gothic was without compromise. 
It was "not only the best, but the only rational archi- 
tecture." "I plead for the introduction of the Gothic 
form into our domestic architecture, not merely because 
it is lovely, but because it is the only form of faithful, 
strong, enduring, and honourable building, in such ma- 
terials as come daily to our hands." * On the other 
hand, Roman architecture is essentially base; the study 
of classical literature is "pestilent"; and most modern 
building is the fruit of "the Renaissance poison tree." 
"If . . . any of my readers should determine ... to 
set themselves to the revival of a healthy school of archi- 
tecture in England, and wish to know in few words how 
this may be done, the answer is clear and simple. First, 
let us cast out utterly whatever is connected with the 
Greek, Roman, or Renaissance architecture, in principle 
or in form. . . . The whole mass of the architecture, 
founded on Greek and Roman models, which we have 
been in the habit of building for the last three centuries, 
is utterly devoid of all life, virtue, honourableness, or 
power of doing good. It is base, unnatural, unfruitful, 

♦"Stones of Venice," vol. ii., p. 295 (American ed. 1S60). 



Tendencies and Results. 377 

unenjoyable, and impious. Pagan in its origin, proud 
and unholy in its revival, paralysed in its old age." * 

Ruskin loved the religious spirit of the mediaeval 
builders, Byzantine, Lombard, or Gothic; and the pure 
and holy faith of the early sacred painters like Fra 
Angelico, Orcagna, and Perugino. He thought that 
whatever was greatest even in Raphael, Leonardo, and 
Michelangelo came from their training in the old relig- 
ious school, not from the new science of the Renaissance. 
" Raphael painted best when he knew least." He de- 
plored the harm to Catholic and Protestant alike of the 
bitter dissensions of the Reformation. But he sorrow- 
fully acknowledged the corruption of the ancient Church, 
and had no respect for modern Romanism. Against the 
opinion that Gothic architecture was fitted exclusively 
for ecclesiastical uses, he strongly protested. On the 
contrary, he advised its reintroduction, especially in 
domestic building. " Most readers . . . abandon them- 
selves drowsily to the impression that Gothic is a pecul- 
iarly ecclesiastical style. . . . The High Church and 
Romanist parties . . . have willingly promulgated the 
theory that, because all the good architecture that is now 
left is expressive of High Church or Romanist doctrines, 
all good architecture ever has been and must be so — 
a piece of absurdity. . . . Wherever Christian Church 
architecture has been good and lovely, it has been merely 
the perfect development of the common dwelling-house 
architecture of the period. . . . The churches were not 
separated by any change of style from the buildings 
round them, as they are now, but were merely more fin- 
ished and full examples of a universal style. . . . Be- 
* Ibid., vol. iii., p. 213. 



378 <^ History of English Romanticism. 

cause the Gothic and Byzantine styles are fit for churches, 
they are not therefore less fit for dwellings. They are in 
the highest sense fit and good for both, nor were they 
ever brought to perfection except when they were used 
for both." * 

The influence of Walter Scott upon Ruskin is note- 
worthy. As a child he read the Bible on Sundays and 
the Waverley Novels on week-days, and he could not re- 
call the time when either had been unknown to him. The 
freshness of his pleasure in the first sight of the frescoes 
of the Campo Santo he describes by saying that it was 
like having three new Scott novels.f Ruskin called 
himself a "king's man," a "violent illiberal," and a 
"Tory of the old-fashioned school, the school of Walter 
Scott." Like Scott, he was proof against the religious 
temptations of mediaevalism. " Although twelfth-century 
psalters are lovely and right," he was not converted to 
Catholic teachings by his admiration for the art of the 
great ages; and writes, with a touch of contempt, of 
those who are " piped into a new creed by the squeak of 
an organ pipe." If Scott was unclassical, Ruskin was 
anti-classical. The former would learn no Greek; and 
the latter complained that Oxford taught him all the 
Latin and Greek that he would learn, but did not teach 
him that fritillaries grew in Iffley meadow.| Even that 
fondness for costume which has been made a reproach 

* Ibid., vol. ii., pp. 109-14. 

f See the final instalment of " Praeterita " for an extended 
eulogy of Scott's verse and prose. 

^ " I know what white, what purple fritillaries 
The grassy harvest of the river-fields 
Above by Ensham, down by Sandford, yields." 

—Matthew Arnold, "Thyrsis." 



tendencies and '^ suits. 379 

against Scott finds justification with Ruskin. "The es- 
sence of modern romance is simply the return of the 
heart and fancy to the things in which they naturally 
take pleasure; and half the influence of the best ro- 
mances, of ' Ivanhoe,' or * Marmion,' or * The Crusaders,' 
or ' The Lady of the Lake,' is completely dependent upon 
the accessories of armour and costume." * Still Ruskin 
had the critical good sense to rate such as they below the 
genuine Scotch novels, like "Old Mortality" and "The 
Heart of Mid-Lothian " ; and he is quite stern towards 
the melodramatic Byronic ideal of Venice. "The impo- 
tent feelings of romance, so singularly characteristic of 
this century, may indeed gild, but never save the re- 
mains of those mightier ages to which they are attached 
like climbing flowers; and they must be torn away from 
the magnificent fragments, if we would see them as they 
stood in their own strength. . . , The Venice of modern 
fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflor- 
escence of decay, a stage dream." f For it cannot be too 
often repeated that the romance is not in the Middle 
Ages themselves, but in their strangeness to our imagi- 
nation. The closer one gets to them, the less romantic 
they appear. 

Medieval Social Ideals. — It is obvious how a fond- 
ness for the Middle Ages, in a man of Scott's conserva- 
tive temper, might confirm him in his attachment to high 
Tory principles and to an aristocratic-feudal ideal of 
society; or how, in an enthusiastic artist like Pugin, and 
a gentleman of high-strung chivalric spirit like Sir 
Kenelm Digby, it might even lead to an adoption of 

♦"Stones of Venice," vol. iii., p. 211. 
f Ibid., vol. ii., p. 4. 



380 <^ History of English 1{pmaniicism. 

the whole mediaeval religious system. But it is not so 
easy, at first sight, to understand why the same thing 
should have conducted Ruskin and William Morris to 
opinions that were more "advanced" than those of the 
most advanced Liberal. Orthodox economists looked 
upon the theories put forward in Ruskin's " Unto this 
Last" (i860), " Munera Pulveris " (1862-63), and "Fors 
Clavigera" (1871-84), as the eccentricities of a distin- 
guished art critic, disporting himself in unfamiliar fields 
of thought. And when in 1883 the poet of "The Earthly 
Paradise" joined the Democratic Federation, and subse- 
quently the Socialist League, and was arrested and fined 
one shilling and costs for addressing open-air meetings, 
obstructing public highways, and striking policemen, 
amusement was mingled with disapproval. What does 
this dreamer of dreams and charming decorative artist 
in a London police court? 

But Socialism, though appearing on the face of it the 
most modern of doctrines, is in a sense reactionary, like 
Catholicism, or knight-errantry, or Gothic architecture. 
That is, those who protest against the individualism of 
the existing social order are wont to contrast it unfavour- 
ably with the principle of association which is found 
everywhere in the Middle Ages. No mediaeval man was 
free or independent; all men were members one of an- 
other. The feudal system itself was an elaborate network 
of interdependent rights and obligations, in which ser- 
vice was given in return for protection. The vassal did 
homage to his lord — became his homtne or man — and his 
lord was bound to take care of him. In theory, at least, 
every serf was entitled to a living. In theory, too, the 
Church embraced all Christendom. None save Jews 



Tendencies and 1{esulfs. 381 

were outside it or could get outside it, except by excom- 
munication; wliich was the most terrible of penalties, 
because it cut a man off from all spiritual human fellow- 
ship. The same principle of co-operation prevailed in 
mediaeval industry and commerce, organised into guilds 
of craftsmen and trading corporations, which fixed the 
prices and quality of goods, the number of apprentices 
allowed, etc. The manufacturer was not a capitalist, but 
simply a master workman. Government was paternal 
and interfered continually with the freedom of contract 
and the rights of the individual. Here was where Carlyle 
took issue with modern Liberalism, which proclaims that 
the best government is that which governs least. Accord- 
ing to the laissez-Jaire doctrine, he said, the work of a 
government is not that of a father, but of an active parish 
constable. The duty of a government is to govern, but 
this theory makes it its duty to refrain from governing. 
Not liberty is good for men, but obedience and stern 
discipline under wise rulers, heroes, and heaven-sent 
kings. Carlyle took no romantic view of the Middle 
Ages. He is rather contemptuous of Scott's mediaeval- 
picturesque,* and his Scotch Calvinism burns fiercely 
against the would-be restorers of mediaeval religious 
formularies and the mummeries of "the old Pope of 
Rome " — a ghastly survival of a dead creed.f He said 
that Newman had the brain of a good-sized rabbit. But 

* Vide supra, p. 35. 

f "I reckon him the remarkablest Pontiff that has darkened 
God's daylight. . . . Here is a Supreme Priest who believes 
God to be — what, in the name of God, does he believe God to 
be? — and discerns that all worship of God is a scenic phantas- 
magory of wax-candles, organ-blasts, Gregorian chants, mass- 
brayings, purple monsignori, etc." ("Past and Present," 
Book iii., chap. i.). 



382 e/^ History of English 1(omanticism. 

in this matter of collectivism versus individualism, 
Carlyle was with the Middle Ages. " For those were 
rugged, stalwart ages. . . . Gurth, born thrall of Cedric, 
it is like, got cuffs as often as pork-parings; but Gurth 
did belong to Cedric; no human creature then went 
about connected with nobody; left to go his way into 
Bastilles or worse, under Laissez-Jaire. . . . That Feudal 
Aristocracy, I say, was no imaginary one. ... It was a 
Land Aristocracy; it managed the Governing of this 
English People, and had the reaping of the Soil of Eng- 
land in return. . . . Soldiering, Police and Judging, 
Church-Extension, nay, real Government and Guidance, 
all this was actually done by the Holders of Land in re- 
turn for their Land. How much of it is now done by 
them; done by anybody ? Good Heavens! ^ Laissez Jaire, 
Do ye nothing, eat your wages and sleep,' is everywhere 
the passionate half-wise cry of this time." * 

From 1850 onwards, in which year Ruskin made Car- 
lyle's acquaintance, the former fell under the dominion of 
these ideas, and began to preach a species of Aristocratic 
Socialism.! He denounced competition and profit-seek- 
ing in commerce; the factory system; the capitalistic 
organisation of industry. His scheme of a regenerated 
society, however, was by no means so democratic as that 
imagined by Morris in " News from Nowhere," It was a 
" new feudalism " with a king at the head of it and a 
rural nobility of "the great old families," whose relations 
to their tenantry are not very clearly defined.J Ruskin 

* Ibid., Book iv., chap. i. 

f With Morris, too, when an Oxford undergraduate, " Car- 
lyle's ' Past and Present, ' " says his biographer, "stood along- 
side of 'Modern Painters ' as inspired and absolute truth." 

X For a systematic exposition of Ruskin 's social and politi- 



Tendencies and 'Results. 383 

took some steps towards putting into practice his plans 
for a reorganisation of labour under improved conditions. 
" Fors Clavigera " consisted of a series of letters to work- 
ingmen, inviting them to join him in establishing a fund 
for rescuing English country life from the tyranny and 
defilement of machinery. In pursuance of this project, 
the St. George's Guild was formed, about 1870, Ruskin 
devoting to it ^^7,000 of his own money. Trustees were 
chosen to administer the fund; a building was bought at 
Walkley, in the suburbs of Sheffield, for use as a mu- 
seum ; and the money subscribed was employed in pro- 
moting co-operative experiments in agriculture, manufac- 
turing, and education. 

In 1848 the widespread misery among the English 
working class, both agricultural labourers and the opera- 
tives in cities, broke out in a startling way in the Chart- 
ist movement. Sympathy with some of the aims of this 
movement found literary expression in Charles Kings- 
ley's novels, " Yeast " and " Alton Locke " ; in his widely 
circulated tract, " Cheap Clothes and Nasty " ; in his let- 
ters in Politics Jor the People over the signature " Parson 
Lot " ; in some of his ballads like " The Three Fishers " ; 
and in the writings of his friends, F. D. Maurice and 
Thomas Hughes. But the Christian Socialism of these 
Broad Churchmen was by no means of the mediaeval type. 
Kingsley was an exponent of " Muscular Christianity." 
He hated the asceticism and sacerdotalism of the Oxford 
set, and challenged the Tractarian movement with all 
his might.* Neither was this Christian Socialism of a 

cal philosophy, the reader should consult "John Ruskin, So- 
cial Reformer," by J. A. Hobson, London, 1898. 
* Vide supra, pp. 279, 280. 



384 <v^ History of English l^omanticism. 

radical nature, like Morris'. It limited itself to an en- 
deavour to alleviate distress by an appeal to the good 
feeling of the upper classes; and by setting on foot trade- 
unions, co-operative societies, and workingmen's col- 
leges. Kingsley himself, like Ruskin, believed in a 
landed gentry; and like both Ruskin and Carlyle, he 
defended Governor Eyre of Jamaica against the attacks 
of the radical press.* 

Ruskin and Morris travelled to Socialism by the path- 
way of art. Carlyle had early begun his complaints 
against the mechanical spirit of the age, and its too great 
reliance on machinery in all departments of thought and 
life.f But Ruskin made war on machinery for different 
reasons. As a lover of the beautiful, he hated its ugly 
processes and products. As a student of art, he mourned 
over the reduction of the handicraftsman to a slave 
of the machine. Factories had poisoned the English 
sky with their smoke, and blackened English soil 
and polluted English rivers with their refuse. The rail- 
road had spoiled Venice and vulgarised Switzerland. 
He would like to tear up all the railroads in Wales and 
most of those in England, and pull down the city of New 
York. He could not live in America two months — a 
country without castles. Modern architecture, modern 
dress, modern manufactures, modern civilisation, were 
all utterly hideous. Worst of all was the effect on the 
workman, condemned by competitive commercialism to 
turn out cheap goods; condemned by division of labour 
to spend his life in making the eighteenth part of a pin. 

*For a number of years, beginning with 1854, Ruskin 
taught drawing classes in Maurice's Working Man's College. 
fSee "Characteristics" and "Signs of the Times." 



Tendencies and Results. 385 

Work without art, said Ruskin, is brutalising. To take 
pleasure in his work, said Morris, is the workman's best 
inducement to labour and his truest reward. In the 
Middle Ages every artisan was an artist ; the art of the 
Middle Ages was popular art. Now that the designer 
and the handicraftsman are separate persons, the work of 
the former is unreal, and of the latter merely mechanical. 
This point of view is eloquently stated in that chapter 
on "The Nature of Gothic" in "The Stones of Venice," 
which made so deep an impression on Morris when he 
was in residence at Oxford.* " It is verily this degra- 
dation of the operative into a machine which, more than 
any other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the 
nations everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive 
struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the 
nature to themselves. Their universal outcry against 
wealth and against nobility is not forced from them 
either by the pressure of famine or the sting of mortified 
pride. These do much, and have done much in all ages ; 
but the foundations of society were never yet shaken as 
they are at this day. It is not that men are ill-fed, but 
that they have no pleasure in the work by which they 
make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the 
only means of pleasure. It is not that men are pained 
by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure 
their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which 
they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes 
them less than men. . . . We have much studied and 
much perfected, of late, the great civilised invention of 
the division of labour; only we give it a false name. 
It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but 
* Vide supra, p. 321. 



386 tA History of English '^Romanticism. 

the men — divided into mere segments of men — broken 
into small fragments and crumbs of life, so that all the 
little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not 
enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in 
making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail. . . . 
And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing 
cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all, in very 
deed, for this — that we manufacture everything there ex- 
cept men. . . . And all the evil to which that cry is urg- 
ing our myriads can be met only . . . by a right under- 
standing, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of 
labour are good for men, raising them, and making them 
happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or 
beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degrada- 
tion of the workman." * 

Morris' contributions to the literature of Socialism in- 
clude, besides his romance, "News from Nowhere," two 
volumes of verse, "Poems by the Way" (i89i)and "The 
Dream of John Ball"; together with "Socialism: Its 
Growth and Outcome" (1893), an historical sketch of 
the subject written in collaboration with Mr, E, Belfort 
Bax. Mackail also describes a satirical interlude, en- 
titled "The Tables Turned, or Nupkins Awakened," 
which was acted thrice at Farringden Road in the au- 
tumn of 1887 — a Socialistic farce in the form of a medi- 
aeval miracle play — a conjunction quite typical of the 
playwright's political principles and literary preferences. 
Morris' ideal society, unlike Ruskin's, included no feudal 
elements; there was no room in it for kings, or nobles, 
or great cities, or a centralised government. It was prim- 

*Vol. ii., chap, vi., §§ xv., xvi. Morris reprinted the 
whole chapter on the Kelmscott Press. 



Tendencies and l^esults. 387 

itive Teutonic rather than mediaeval; resembling the 
communal type described in " The House of the Wolf- 
ings." There were to be no more classes — no rich or 
poor. To ordinary Socialists the reform means a fairer 
distribution of the joint product of capital and labour; 
higher wages for the workingman, shorter hours, better 
food and more of it, better clothes, better houses, more 
amusements — in short, " beer and skittles " in reasonable 
amount. The Socialism of Ruskin and Morris was an 
outcome of their aesthetic feeling. They liked to imag- 
ine the work people of the future as an intelligent and 
artistic body of handicraftsmen, living in pretty Gothic 
cottages among gardens of their own, scattered all over 
England in small rural towns or villages, and joyfully 
engaged in making sound and beautiful objects of use, 
tools, furniture, woven goods, etc. To the followers of 
Mr. Hyndman these motives, if not these aims, must have 
seemed somewhat unpractical. And in reading "Fors 
Clavigera," one sometimes has a difficulty in understand- 
ing just what sort of person Ruskin imagined the British 
workman to be. 

The Neo-Romanticists. — The literature of each new 
generation is apt to be partly an imitation of the last, 
and partly a reaction against it. The impulse first 
given by Rossetti was communicated, through Mor- 
ris and Swinburne, to a group of younger poets whom 
Mr. Stedman distinguishes as " Neo-Romanticists." * 
The most noteworthy among these are probably Arthur 
0'Shaughnessy,f John Payne, J and Thdophile Mar- 

*" Victorian Poets," chap, vii., § vi. 

f'An Epic of Women " (1870) ; "Lays of France" (1872) ; 

" Music and Moonlight " (1874); " Songs of a Worker " (i88i). 

}"A Masque of Shadows" (1870): "Intaglios" (1871) ; 



388 <iA History of English l^omanticism. 

zials;* though mention (want of space forbids more) 
should also be made of George Augustus Simcox, whose 
"Poems and Romances" (1869) are in the Pre-Raphael- 
ite tradition. The work of each of these has pronounced 
individuality; yet, as a whole, it reminds one continually 
now of Rossetti, now of Morris, and again of Swinburne; 
not infrequently, too, of Keats or Leigh Hunt; but never 
of the older romanticism, never of Scott nor even of 
Coleridge or Tennyson. The reminder comes sometimes 
through a turn of phrase or the trick of the verse ; but more 
insistently in the choice of subject and the entire attitude 
of the poet towards art and life, an attitude that may be 
vaguely described as "aesthetic." Even more distinctly 
than in Swinburne, English romanticism in these latest 
representatives is seen to be taking a French direction. 
They show the influence not only of Hugo and Gautier, 
but of those more recent schools of " decadents " which 
exhibit French romanticism in its deliquescent stage; 
writers like Theodore de Banville and Charles Baude- 
laire; books like Aloysius Bertrand's "Gaspard de la 
Nuit." Morbid states of passion; the hectic bloom of 
fever; heady perfumes of the Orient and the tropics; 
the bitter-sweet blossom of love; forced fruits of the hot- 
house {serres chaudes); the iridescence of standing pools; 
the fungoidal growths of decay; such are some of the 
hackneyed metaphors which render the impression of 
this neo-romantic poetry. 

Marzials was born at Brussels, of French parents. 
His "Gallery of Pigeons" is inscribed to the modern 

"Songs of Life and Death" (1872) ; "Lautrec" (1878) ; "New 
Poems" (1880). 
*"A Gallery of Pigeons" (1873), 



Tendencies and 'Results. 389 

Provencal poet Aubanel, and introduced by a French 
sonnet. O'Shaughnessy " was half a Frenchman in his 
love for, and mastery of, the French language " ; * and 
on his frequent visits to Paris, made close acquaintance 
with Victor Hugo and the younger school of French 
poets, O'Shaughnessy and Payne were intimate friends, 
and dedicated their first books to each other. In 1870-72 
they were members of the literary circle that assembled 
at the house of Ford Madox Brown, and there they met 
the Rossettis, Morris, Swinburne, and William Bell 
Scott. O'Shaughnessy emerges most distinctly from the 
group by reason of his very original and exquisite lyrical 
gift — a gift not fully recognised till Mr. Palgrave ac- 
corded him, in the second series of his "Golden Treas- 
ury" (1897), a greater number of selections than any 
Victorian poet but Tennyson: a larger space than he 
gave either to Browning or Rossettior Matthew Arnold. f 
Comparatively little of O'Shaughnessy's work belongs to 
the department of mediaeval -romantic. His "Lays of 
France," five in number, are founded upon the lais of 

♦"Arthur O'Shaughnessy." By Louise Chandler-Moulton, 
Cambridge and Chicago, 1894. 

f Swinburne, as a living author, is not represented in the 
"Treasury." O'Shaughnessy's metrical originality is un- 
doubted. But one of his finest lyrics, "The Fountain of 
Tears," has an echo of Baudelaire's American master, Edgar 
Foe, as well as of Swinburne ; 

"Very peaceful the place is, and solely 
For piteous lamenting and sighing. 
And those who come living or dying 

Alike from their hopes and their fears : 
Full of cypress-like shadows the place is, 
And statues that cover their faces ; 

But out of the gloom springs the holy 

And beautiful Fountain of Tears." 



390 =^ History of English l^manticism. 

Marie de France, the Norman poetess of the thirteenth 
century whose little fable, " Du coq et du werpil," Chau- 
cer expanded into his " Nonne Prestes Tale." O'Shaugh- 
nessy's versions are not so much paraphrases as in- 
dependent poems, following Marie's stories merely in 
outline. 

The verse is the eight-syllabled couplet with variations 
and alternate riming; the style follows the graceful, 
fluent simplicity of the Old French ; and in its softly 
articulated, bright-coloured prolixity, the narrative fre- 
quently suggests " The Earthly Paradise " or " The Story 
of Rimini." The most remarkable of these pieces is 
" Chaitivel," in which the body of a bride is carried away 
by a dead lover, while another dead lover comes back 
from his grave in Palestine and fights with the bride- 
groom for possession of her soul. The song which the 
lady sings to the buried man is true to that strange medi- 
aeval materialism, the cleaving of "soul's love" to 
"body's love," the tenderness intense that pierces the 
" wormy circumstance " of the tomb, and refuses to let 
the dead be dead, which was noted in Keats' "Isabella": 

"Hath any loved you well, down there, 
Summer or winter through? 
Down there, have j'ou found any fair 

Laid in the grave with you? 
Is death's long kiss a richer kiss 
Than mine was wont to be — 
Or have you gone to some far bliss 
And quite forgotten me?" 

Of similar inspiration, but more pictorially and exter- 
nally Gotliic, are such tales as "The Building of the 
Dream" and "Sir Floris" in Payne's volume, "The 
Masque of Shadows." The former of these, introduced 



Tendencies and Results. 391 

by a quotation from Jehan du Mestre, is the history of a 
certain squire of Poitou, who devotes himself to necro- 
mancy and discovers a spell in an old Greek manuscript, 
whereby, having shod his horse with gold and ridden 
seven days into the west, he comes to the enchanted land 
of Dame Venus and dwells with her a season. But the 
bliss is insupportable by a mortal, and he returns to his 
home and dies. The poem has analogies with "The 
Earthly Paradise" and the Tannhauser legend. The 
ancient city of Poitou, where the action begins, is elabo- 
rately described, with its " lazy grace of old romance " : 

" Fair was the place and old 
Beyond the memory of man, with roofs 

Tall-peak'd and hung with woofs 
Of dainty stone-work, jewell'd with the grace 

Of casements, in the face 
Of the white gables inlaid, in all hues 

Of lovely reds and blues. 
At every corner of the winding ways 

A carven saint did gaze, 
With mild sweet eyes, upon the quiet town, 

From niche and shrine of brown ; 
And many an angel, graven for a charm 

To save the folk from harm 
Of evil sprites, stood sentinel above 

High pinnacle and roof." 

" Sir Floris " is an allegorical romaunt founded on a pas- 
sage in "LeViolier des Histoires Provenciaux." The 
dedication, to the author of " Lohengrin," praises Wolf- 
ram von Eschenbach, the poet of " Parzival," as " the 
sweetest of all bards." Sir Floris, obeying a voice heard 
in sleep, followed a white dove to an enchanted garden, 
where he slew seven monsters, symbolic of the seven 
deadly sins; from whose blood sprang up the lily of 
chastity, the rose of love, the violet of humility, the 
clematis of content, the marigold of largesse, the mystic 



392 <iA History of English l^pmanticism. 

marguerite, and the holy vervain " that purgeth earth's 
desire." Sir Galahad then carries him in a magic boat 
to the Orient city of Sarras, where the Grail is enshrined 
and guarded by a company of virgin knights, Percival, 
Lohengrin, Titurel, and Bors. Sir Floris sees the sacred 
chalice — a single emerald — lays his nosegay upon the 
altar, witnesses the mystery of the eucharist, and is kissed 
upon the mouth by Christ, This poet is fond of intro- 
ducing old French words " to make his English sweet upon 
his tongue " ; accueillade, valiantise, Jaineant, allegresse, 
gentiles se,Jorte et dure, and occasionally a phrase like dieu 
vous doint Jelicite. Payne's ballads are less characteris- 
tic* Perhaps the most successful of them is "The 
Rime of Redemption" — in "The Masque of Shadows" 
volume. Sir Loibich's love has died in her sins, and he 
sits by the fire in bitter repentance. He hears the voice 
of her spirit outside in the moonlight, and together they 
ride through the night on a black steed, first to Fairy- 
land, then to Purgatory, and then to the gate of Heaven. 
Each of these in turn is offered him, but he rejects them 

all— 

"With thee in hell, I choose to dwell " — 

and thereby works her redemption. The wild night ride 
has an obvious resemblance to "Lenore": 

"The wind screams past ; they ride so fast. 
Like troops of souls in pain 
The snowdrifts spin, but none may win 
To rest upon the twain." 

Very different from these, and indeed with no pretensions 

*See especially "Sir Erwin's Questing." "The Ballad of 
May Margaret," "The Westward Sailing," and "The Ballad 
of the King's Daughter " in "Songs of Life and Death." 



Tendencies and %esults. 393 

to the formal peculiarities of popular minstrelsy, is 
O'Shaughnessy's weird ballad " Bisclaveret," * suggested 
by the suoerstition concerning were-wolves: 

"The splendid fearful herds that stray 
By midnight " — 
"The multitudinous campaign 
Of hosts not yet made fast in Hell." 

Bisclaveret is the Breton word for loup garou ; and the 
poem is headed with a caption to this effect from the 
"Lais "of Marie. The wild, mystical beauty of which 
the Celtic imagination holds the secret is visible in this 
lyrist; but it would perhaps be going too far to attribute 
his interest in the work of Marie de France to a native 
sympathy with the song spirit of that other great branch 
of the Celtic race, the ancient Cymry. 

Payne's volume of sonnets, " Intaglios " (a title per- 
haps prompted by the chiselled workmanship of Gautier's 
" Emaux et Camees ") bears the clearest marks of Ros- 
setti's influence — or of the influence of Dante through 
Rossetti. The inscription poem is to Dante, and the 
series named "Madonna dei Sogni " is particularly full 
of the imagery and sentiment of the " Purgatorio " and 
the " Vita Nuova." Several of the sonnets in the collec- 
tion are written for pictures, like Rossetti's. Two are 
on Spenserian subjects, "Eelphoebe" and "The Garden 
of Adonis"; and one, " Bride-Night " is suggested by 
Wagner's "Tristram und Isolde." Payne's work as a 
translator is of importance, and includes versions of the 
"Decameron," "The Thousand and One Nights," and 
the poems of Francois Villon, all made for the Villon 
Society. 

*In "An Epic of Women." 



394 -^ History of English '^manticism. 

Jewels and flowers are set thickly enough in the pages 
of all this school; but it is in Thdophile Marzials' singu- 
lar, yet very attractive, verses that the luxurious colour 
in which romance delights, and the decorative features 
of Pre-Raphaelite art run into the most bizarre excesses. 
He wantons in dainty affectations of speech and eccen- 
tricities of phantasy. Here we find again the orchard 
closes, the pleached pleasances, and all those queer pic- 
ture paradises, peopled with tall lilied maidens, angels 
with peacock wings and thin gold hoops above their heads, 
and court minstrels thrumming lutes, rebecks, and man- 
dolins — 

"I dreamed I was a virginal — 
The gilt one of Saint Cecily's." 

The book abounds in nocturnes, arabesques, masquerades, 
bagatelles, rococo pastorals. The lady in " The Gallery 
of Pigeons " sits at her broidery frame and works tapes- 
tries for her walls. At night she sleeps in the northern 
tower where 

"Above all tracery, carven flower. 
And grim gurgoil is her bower-window " ; 

and higher up a griffin clings against a cornice, 

"And gnashes and grins in the green moonlight," 

and higher still, the banderolle flutters 

"At the top of the thinnest pinnacle peak." 

In a Pre-Raphaelite heaven the maidens sit in the blessed 
mother's chamber and spin garments for the souls in 
Limbo, or press sweet wine for the sacrament, or illu- 
minate missals with quaint phantasies. Mr. Stedman 
quotes a few lines which he says have the air of parody: 



Tendencies and l^esults. 395 

"They chase them each, below, above, — 
Half madden'd by their minstrelsy, — 

Thro' garths of crimson gladioles ; 
And, shimmering soft like damoisels. 
The angels swarm in glimmering shoals, 

And pin them to their aureoles. 
And mimick back their ritournels." 

This reads, indeed, hardly less like a travesty than the 
well-known verses in Punch : 

"Glad lady mine, that glitterest 

In shimmer of summer athwart the lawn ; 
Canst tell me whether is bitterest, 
The glamour of eve, or the glimmer of dawn? " 

This stained-glass imagery was so easy to copy that, be- 
fore long, citoles and damoisels and aureoles and garths 
and glamours and all the rest of the picturesque furniture 
grew to be a burden. The artistic movement had invaded 
dress and upholstery, and Pre-Raphaelitism tapered down 
into aestheticism, domestic art, and the wearing of sun- 
flowers. Du Maurier became its satirist; Bunthorn and 
Postlethwaite presented it to the philistine understanding 
in a grotesque mixture of caricature and quackery. 

The Reaction. — Literary epochs overlap at the edges, 
and contrasting literary modes coexist. There was some 
romantic poetry written in Pope's time ; and in the very 
heat and fury of romantic predominance, Landor kept a 
cool chamber apart, where incense was burned to the 
ancient gods.* But it is the master current which gives 

*"From time to time bright spirits, intolerant of the tradi- 
tional, try to alter the bournes of time and space in these re- 
spects, and to make out that the classical, whatever the fail- 
ings on its part, was always in its heart rather Romantic, and 
that the Romantic has always, at its best, been just a little 
classical. . . . But such observations are only of use as guards 
against a too wooden and matter-of-fact classification ; the 



396 <v^ History of English T{omanttcism. 

tinge and direction to lesser confluents; and romanti- 
cism may be said to have had everything its own way 
down to the middle of the century. Then reaction set in 
and the stream of romantic tendency ceased to spread 
itself over the whole literary territory, but flowed on in 
the narrower and deeper channels of Pre-Raphaelitism 
and its allied movements. This reaction expressed itself 
in different ways, of which it will be sufficient here to 
mention three: realistic fiction, classical criticism, and 
the Queen Anne revival. 

The leading literary form of the past fifty years has 
been the novel of real life. The failure of " Les Bur- 
graves" in 1843 not more surely signalised the end of 
French romanticism, than the appearance of " Vanity 
Fair" in 1848 announced that in England, too, the reign 
of romance was over. Classicism had given way before 
romanticism, and now romanticism in turn was yielding 
to realism. Realism sets itself against that desire of 
escape from actual conditions into an ideal world, which 
is a note of the romantic spirit in general ; and conse- 
quently it refuses to find the past any more interesting 
than the present, and has no use for the Middle Ages. 
The temperature, too, had cooled ; not quite down to the 
Augustan grade, yet to a point considerably below the 
fever heat registered by the emotional thermometer of 
the late Georgian era. Byron's contemporaries were 
shocked by his wickedness and dazzled by his genius. 
They remonstrated admiringly with him; young ladies 
wept over his poetry and prayed for the poet's conver- 

great general differences of the periods remain, and can never 
be removed in imagination without loss and confusion " ("A 
Short History of English Literature," Saintsbury, p. 724). 



Tendencies and Insults. 397 

sion. But young university men of Thackeray's time 
discovered that Byron was z poseiir ; Thackeray himself 
describes him as "a big, sulky dandy." "The Sorrows 
of Werther," which made people cry in the eighteenth 
century, made Thackeray laugh; and he summed it up 
in a doggerel ballad : 

" Charlotte was a married woman 
And a moral man was Werther, 
And for nothing in creation 

Would do anything to hurt her." 



" Charlotte, having seen his body 

Borne before her on a shutter, 
Like a well-conducted woman. 

Went on cutting bread and butter." 

Mr. Howells in Venice sneers at Byron's theatrical 
habit of riding horesback on the Lido in "conspicuous 
solitude," as recorded in "Julian and Maddalo." He 
notices the local traditions about Byron — a window from 
which one of his mistresses was said to have thrown 
herself into the canal, etc. — and confesses that these 
matters interest him very little. 

As to the Walter Scott kind of romance, we know what 
Mr. Howells thinks of it; and have read "Rebecca and 
Rowena," Thackeray's travesty of "Ivanhoe." Thack- 
eray took no print from the romantic generation; he 
passed it over, and went back to Addison, Fielding, 
Goldsmith, Swift. His masters were the English hu- 
mourists of the eighteenth century. He planned a lit- 
erary history of that century, a design which was carried 
out on other lines by his son-in-law, Leslie Stephen. If 
he wrote historical novels, their period was that of the 
Georges, and not of Richard the Lion Heart. It will 



39^ t/^ History of English l^omanticism. 

not do, of course, to lay too much stress on Thackeray, 
whose profession was satire and whose temper purely 
anti-romantic. But if we turn to the leaders of the mod- 
ern schools of fiction, we shall find that some of them, 
like George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, are even more 
closely realistic than Thackeray — who, says Mr, Howells, 
is a caricaturist, not a true realist — and of others such as 
Dickens and Meredith, we shall find that, in whatever 
way they deviate from realism as strictly understood, it 
is not in the direction of romance. 

In Matthew Arnold's critical essays we meet with a 
restatement of classical principles and an application of 
them to the literature of the last generation. There was 
something premature, he thinks, about the burst of crea- 
tive activity in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. 
Byron was empty of matter, Shelley incoherent, Words- 
worth wanting in completeness and variety. He finds 
much to commend in the influence of a literary tribunal 
like the French Academy, which embodies that ideal of 
authority so dear to the classical heart. Such an institu- 
tion acts as a salutary check on the lawlessness, eccen- 
tricity, self-will, and fantasticality which are the beset- 
ting intellectual sins of Englishmen. It sets the standard 
and gives the law. " Work done after men have reached 
this platform is classical ; and that is the only work which, 
in the long run, can stand." For want of some such 
organ of educated opinion, to take care of the qualities of 
order, balance, measure, propriety, correctness, English 
men of genius like Ruskin and Carlyle, in their national 
impatience of prescription and routine, run on into all 
manner of violence, freak, and extravagance. 

Again, in the preface of the 1853 edition of his poems, 



Tendencies and Insults. 399 

Arnold asserts the superiority of the Greek theory of 
poetry to the modern. "They regarded the whole; we 
regard the parts. With them the action predominated 
over the expression of it; with us the expression predom- 
inates over the action. . . . We have poems which seem 
to exist merely for the sake of single lines and passages; 
not for the sake of producing any total impression." 

" Faust" itself, judged as a whole, is defective. Fail- 
ing a sure guide, in the confusion of the present times, 
the wisest course for the young writer is to fix his atten- 
tion upon the best models. But Shakspere is not so safe 
a model as the ancients. He has not their purity of 
method, and his gift of expression sometimes leads him 
astray. "Mr. Hallam, than whom it is impossible to 
find a saner and more judicious critic, has had the cour- 
age (for at the present day it needs courage) to remark, 
how extremely and faultily difficult Shakspere's language 
often is." Half a century earlier it would have needed 
courage to question Hallam's remark; but the citation 
shows how thoroughly Coleridge and Hazlitt and Lamb 
had shifted the centre of orthodoxy in matters of Shak- 
sperian criticism. JVow the presumption was against any 
one who ventured a doubt of Shakspere's impeccability. 
The romantic victory was complete. " But, I say," pur- 
sues the essayist, " that in the sincere endeavour to learn 
and practise . . . what is sound and true in poetical art, 
I seemed to myself to find the only sure guidance, the 
only solid footing, among the ancients." All this has 
a familiar look to one at all read in eighteenth-century 
criticism; but in 1853 it sounds very much like heresy. 

As an instance of the inferiority of romantic to classi- 
cal method in narrative poetry, Arnold refers to Keats' 



400 <^ History of English Romanticism. 

" Isabella." * " This one short poem contains, perhaps, 
a greater number of happy single expressions which one 
could quote than all the extant tragedies of Sophocles. 
But the action, the story? The action in itself is an ex- 
cellent one; but so feebly is it conceived by the poet, 
so loosely constructed, that the effect produced by it, in 
and for itself, is absolutely null. Let the reader, after 
he has finished the poem of Keats, turn to the same story 
in the ' Decameron ' ; he will then feel how pregnant and 
interesting the same action has become in the hands of a 
great artist who, above all things, delineates his object; 
who subordinates expression to that which it is designed 
to express." 

A sentence or two from Arnold's essay on Heinrich 
Heine, and we may leave this part of our subject. " Mr. 
Carlyle attaches, it seems to me, far too much importance 
to the romantic school of Germany — Tieck, Novalis, Jean 
Paul Richter. . . . The mystic and romantic school of 
Germany lost itself in the Middle Ages, was overpowered 
by their influence, came to ruin by its vain dreams of 
renewing them. Heine, with a far profounder sense of 
the mystic and romantic charm of the Middle Age than 
Gorres, or Brentano, or Arnim ; Heine, the chief romantic 
poet of Germany, is yet also much more than a romantic 
poet; he is a great modern poet, he is not conquered by 
the Middle Age, he has a talisman by which he can feel, 
along with but above the power of the fascinating Mid- 
dle Age itself, the power of modern ideas." 

And, finally, the oscillation of the pendulum has 
brought us back again for a moment to the age of gayety, 
and to that very Queen Anne spirit against which the 
* Vide supra, pp. 123-25. 



Tendencies and %esults. 401 

serious and sentimental Thomson began the revolt. 
There is not only at present a renewed appreciation of 
what was admirable in the verse of Pope and the prose 
of Swift, but we discover a quaint attractiveness in the 
artificiality of Augustan manners, dress, and speech. 
Lace and brocade, powder and patch, Dutch gardens, 
Reynolds' portraits, Watteau fans, Dresden china, the 
sedan chair, the spinet, the hoop-skirt, the fa/on rouge — 
all these have receded so far into the perspective as to 
acquire picturesqueness. To Scott's generation they 
seemed eminently modern and prosaic, while buff jerkins 
and coats of mail were poetically remote. But so the 
whirligig of time brings in its revenges, and the old- 
fashioned, as distinguished from the antique, begins to 
have a romanticness of its own. It is now some quarter 
century since people took to building Queen Anne cot- 
tages, and gentlemen at costume parties to treading 
minuets in small clothes and perukes, with ladies in high- 
cushioned hair and farthingales. Girl babies in large 
numbers were baptised Dorothy and Belinda. Book illus- 
trators like Kate Greenaway, Edwin Abbey, and Hugh 
Thomson carried the mode into art. The date of the Queen 
Anne revival in literature and the beginnings of the brk-d- 
brac school of verse are marked with sufficient precision by 
the publication of Austin Dobson's " Vignettes in Rhyme " 
(1873), "Proverbs in Porcelain" (1877), and the other 
delightful volumes of the same kind that have followed. 
Mr. Dobson has also published, in prose, lives of Steele, 
Fielding, Hogarth, and Goldsmith; "Eighteenth-Century 
Vignettes," and the like. But his particular ancestor 
among the Queen Anne wits was Matthew Prior, of whose 
metrical tales, epigrams, and vers de socitte he has made 



402 ey/ History of English %omanticism. 

a little book of selections; and whose gallantry, light- 
ness, and tone of persiflage, just dashed with sentiment, he 
has reproduced with admirable spirit in his own original 
work. 

It was upon the question of Pope that romantics and 
classics first joined issue in the time of Warton, and that 
the critical battle was fought in the time of Bowles and 
Byron; the question of his real place in literature, and 
of his title to the name of poet. Mr. Dobson has a word 
to say for Pope, and with this our enquiries may fittingly 
end: 

"Suppose you say your Worst of POPE, declare 
His Jewels Paste, his Nature a Parterre, 
His Art but Artifice — I ask once more 
Where have you seen such artifice before? 
Where have you seen a Parterre better grac'd, 
Or gems that glitter like his Gems of Paste? 
Where can you show, among your Names of Note, 
So much to copy and so much to quote? 
And where, in Fine, in all our English Verse, 
A Style more trenchant and a Sense more terse? " 

"So I, that love the old Augfustan Days 
Of formal courtesies and formal Phrase ; 
That like along the finish 'd Line to feel 
The Ruffle's Flutter and the Flash of Steel ; 
That like my Couplet as Compact as Clear ; 
That like my Satire sparkling tho' severe, 
Unmix'd with Bathos and unmarr'd by trope, 
I fling my Cap for Polish— and for POPE ! " * 

But ground once gained in a literary movement is never 
wholly lost; and a reversion to an earlier type is never 
complete. The classicism of Matthew Arnold is not at 
all the classicism of the eighteenth century; Thackeray's 
realism is not the realism of Fielding. It is what it is, 
partly just because Walter Scott had written his Wa- 
*" A Dialogue to the Memory of Mr. Alexander Pope." 



Tendencies and Insults. 403 

verley Novels in the mean while. Apart from the works 
for which it is directly responsible, the romantic move- 
ment had enriched the blood of the literature, and its re- 
sults are seen even in writings hostile to the romantic 
principles. As to the absolute value of the great roman- 
tic output of the nineteenth century, it may be at once 
acknowledged that, as " human documents," books which 
reflect contemporary life have a superior importance to 
the creations of the modern imagination, playing freely 
over times and places distant, and attractive through 
their distance; over ancient Greece or the Orient or the 
Middle Age. But that a very beautiful and quite legiti- 
mate product of literary art may spring from this contact 
of the present with the past, it is hoped that our history 
may have shown. 



THE END. 



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Jameson, Anna. "Sacred and Legendary Art." London, 

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Joyce, R. D. "Deirdrfe. Boston. 1876. 
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Keats, John. Poetical Works. (Rossetti's ed.) London, 

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Keble, John. "The Christian Year." Philadelphia, 1834. 
Kelly, J. F. M. "A History of Spanish Literature." New 

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Ker, W. P. "Epic and Romance." London, 1897. 



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Lockhart, J. G. "Ancient Spanish Ballads." New York, 
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"Life of Scott." Boston and Philadephia, 1837-38. 

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INDEX 



Abbot, The. 42 
Aben-Humeya, 246 
Addison, Jos., 95 
Adonais, 120 
Age of Wordsworth, The, 12, 

24, 34, 87. 88 
Ahnung und Gegenwart, 147 
Alhambra, The, 239 
Allemagne, L', 139, 141-45, 

192, 208 
Allingham, Wm,, 258, 300, 

304. 324 
Alonzo the Brave, 77, 83 
Alton Locke, 383 
Amadis of Gaul. 236, 241 
Amber Witch, The, 42, 280 
Ancient Mariner, The, 48, 49, 

54. 74-80 
Ancient Poetry and Romance 

of Spain, 248 
Ancient Spanish Ballads, 239, 

247-49 
Anima Poetae, 78 
Annales Romantiques, 201 
Anthony, 198 

Antiquary, The, 31, 33, 178 
Appreciations, 42 
Ariosto, Lodovico, 91, 104, 

107, 109. 122 
Arme Heinrich, Der, 297 
Arnim, Achim von, 134, 138, 

155, 167, 192, 400 
Arnold, Matthew, 255, 256, 

263, 274-76. 278, 280, 356. 

378, 398-4CO, 402 
Arthur's Tomb, 305 



Aslauga's Knight, 168 
Aspects of Poetry, 18 
At Eleusis, 342 
Athenaeum. The. 134 
Aucassin et Nicolete, 330 
Aue, Hartmann von. 297 
Aulnoy, Comtesse d', 194 
Austin, Sarah, 162, 170 
Ave atque Vale. 349 

Bagehot, Walter, 39 
Balin and Balan, 347. 348 
Ballad of a Nun. 263. 264 
Ballad of Dead Ladies, 298 
Ballad of Judas Iscariot, 263 
Ballade a la Lune. 189 
Ballads and Sonnets (Ros- 

setti), 310 
Ballads of Irish Chivalry, 260 
Balzac, Honore de, 42 
Bande Noire, La, 216 
Banshee and Other Poems, 

The, 261 
Banville. Theodore F. de, 388 
Barante, P. A. P. B.. 226 
Bards of the Gael and the 

Gall. 260 
Basso, Andrea de, no 
Baudelaire, Chas., 388. 389 
Bax, E. B.. 386 
Beata Beatrix. 291. 303, 310 
Beckford, Wm., 367 
Belle Dame sans Merci, La, 

86. 118, 119, 127, 262, 279, 

303. 307 
Berlioz, Hector, 180, r8i 



414 



Judex. 



Bertrand, A., 175, 388 
Beyle, Henri. See Stendhal. 
Biographia Literaria, 48, 55, 

63, 88, 89 
Bisclaveret. 393 
Blackmore, Sir Richard, 269, 

270 
Blake, Wm., 99 
Blessed Damozel, The, 285, 

301, 308, 311, 343 
Blue Closet, The, 305 
Blidthenstaub, 167 
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 92, 123, 

124 
Bowles, W. L., 55-73 
Bowring, Sir Jno., 248 
Boyd, Henry, 96, 97 
Boyesen, H. H., 139, 159, 160, 

165 
Brandl, Alois, 50-55, 75, 77, 

82, 86 
Brentano, Clemens, 134, 138, 

141, 147, 153. 155. 167, 192, 

247, 400 
Bridal of Triermain, The, 6, 

13. 14 
Bride's Prelude, The, 300, 

311 
Broad Stone of Honour, The, 

363-66 
Brooke, Stopford A., 261 
Brown, F. M., 389 
Brownie of Bodsbeck, The, 

253 
Browning, Elizabeth B., 277, 

278 
Browning, Robert, 190, 221, 

276, 277 
Buchanan, Robert, 263 
Building of the Dream, The, 

390, 391 
Biirger, G. A., 83, 133, 144, 

159, 192, 297 
Burgraves, Les, 226, 299, 396 
Burke, Edmund, 145 
Burne-Jones, Edward, 285, 

304, 305, 309, 318-20, 322, 

324. 340 



Byron, Geo. Gordon, Lord, 8, 
9, 26, 53, 60, 65-73, 81, 84, 
99-101, ro6, ii6-i8, 171, 192, 
195, 196, 203. 2§fl-34, 246," 

333. 396-98 

Caine, T. Hall, 279, 296, 301, 

302, 308 
Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 

156, 192. 234, 247 
Calidore, 129 
Callista, 355, 357 
Calverley, C. S., 249 
Campbell, Thomas, 64-67, 71, 

72 
Cancionero, The, 246 
Carlyle, Thos., 15, 35, 39, 92, 

103, III, 137, 149, 151, 160, 

162, 164, 168, 171, 335, 381, 

382, 384, 398, 400 
Cary, Henry F. , 97-99, 102 
Castle by the Sea, The, 170 
Castle of Otranto, The, 4, lo 
Cecil Dreeme, 367 
Chaitivel, 390 
Chartier, Alain, 118 
Chasse du Burgrave, La, 189, 

277 
Chateaubriand, F. A. de, 90, 

176, 191, 202-08, 225, 246, 363 
Chatterton, Thos., 52, 54, 86, 

119, 191, 300 
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 93, 315-17, 

328, 329 
Cheap Clothes and Nasty, 383 
Chevaliers de la Table 

Ronde, Les, 225 
Childe Harold, 70, 73. 91, 99, 

233 
Childe Roland, 276 
Christabel. 14, 27, 49, 53, 54, 

75, 80-85, ^26, 296 
Christian Year, The, 357, 361 
Christmas Carol, A, 343 
Chronicle of the Cid, 236 
Cinq Mars, 191 
Civil Wars of Granada, The, 

247 



Index. 



415 



Cloister and the Hearth, The, 

230, 231 
Coleridge. S. T., 9, 12-14, 27, 

48-63, 74-89, 97-99, 119, 126, 

127, 136-38, 158, 159, 168, 

291, 295-97, 314, 355 
Collins, J. Churton, 257, 260 
Collinson, Jas., 284, 292, 293 
Colvin, Sidney, 116. 127 
Conde Alarcos, 247 
Congal, 260 
Conquete d'Angleterre, La, 

39, 226 
Conservateur Litteraire, Le, 

201 
Conspiracy of Venice, The, 

246 
Contes Bizarres, 167 
Contes Drolatiques, 42 
Contrasts, 368-71, 375 
Count Gismond, 276 
Courthope, W. J., 314 
Cowper, Wm., 57, 58, 68 
Croker, T. C, 253, 256, 258 
Cromwell, 90, 218, 221 
Cross, W. L., I, 31, 38 

Dante, Alighieri, 40, 90-113, 

122, 282, 290, 298-301, 310, 

311, 362, 393 
Dante and his Circle, 299, 303 
Dante at Verona, 310 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti 

(Sharp), 291, 292, 306 
Dante's Dream, 291 
Dark Ladie. The, 49, 86 
Dark Rosaleen, 259 
Dasent, Sir Geo., 334 
Davidson, Jno., 263, 264 
Day Dream, The, 265-67 
Death of Mile, de Sombreuil, 

The, 216 
Decameron, The, 123, 124, 

393. 400 
Defence of Guenevere, The, 

275, 296. 309, 321, 324-28 
Defence of Poetry (Shelley) , 



Deirdre, 260 

Dejection : an Ode, 60, 86 
Delacroix, Eugene, 177, 178 
De Quincey, Thos. , 38 
Development of the English 

Novel, The, i, 31, 38 
Dev6ria, Eugene, 178, 195 
Dialogue to the Memory of 

Mr. Alexander Pope, 402 
Dies Iree, 5, 153 
Digby, Kenelm H., 319, 363- 

66, 379 
Discourse of the Three Uni- 
ties. 133 
Divine Comedy, The, 92-99, 

102, 103, 105, 109, III, 282, 

290, 310, 362, 366 
Djinns, The, 189 
Dobell, Sydney, 262, 263 
Dobson, Austin, 401, 402 
Don Alvaro, 246 
Dondey, Theophile, 185, 190 
Don Quixote, 156, 241 
Dream of Gerontius, The, 362 
Dream of John Ball, The, 386 
Dryden, Jno., 117, 124, 125, 

269 
Dues de Bourgogne, Les, 226 
Dumas, Alexandre, 198, 209 
Diirer, Albrecht, 152, 153, 324, 

373. 374 

Earthly Paradise, The, 237, 
238. 315, 321, 328-32, 334, 
380, 390, 391 

Ecclesiologist, The, 375 

Edda, The, 334 

Eden Bower, 315 

EichendorfE, Joseph von, 146 

Eighteenth Century Vig- 
nettes, 401 

Elfinland Wud, 254, 255 

Elves, The, 163 

Emerson, R. W., 165, 166, 307 

Endymion, 121, 126, 128, 342 

English Bards and Scotch Re- 
viewers, 26, 60, 63, 69, 70, 
72 



4i6 



Index. 



English Contemporary Art, 

293 
Enid, 270, 272 
Epic and Romance, 46, 47 
Epic of Women, An, 393 
Epipsychidion, loi, 310 
Erfindung des Rosenkranzes, 

Die, 153 
Erl King, The, 192 
Erskine, Wm., 6, 7, 13 
Espronceda, Jose de, 246 
Essay on Epic Poetry (Hay- 
ley), 95 
Essays and Studies (Swin- 
burne), 349, 351 
Essays on German Literature 
(Boyesen), 139, 159, 160, 

165 
Essays on the Picturesque 

(Price) , 34 
Eve of St. Agnes, The, 85, 

107, 120-22, 125-29, 307 
Eve of St. John. The, 13, 22, 

23 
Eve of St. Mark, The, 130, 131 

Faber, F. W., 360, 362 

Faerie Queene, The, 120, 275 

Fairies. The, 258 

Fair Inez, 279 

Fairy Legends of the South 

of Ireland, 253, 256. 258 
Fairy Thorn, The, 258 
Familiar Studies of Men and 

Books, 32 
Fantasio, 226 
Faust, T78, 191, 192, 238 
Feast of the Poets, The, 108 
Ferguson, Sir Samuel, 258-60 
Fichte, J. G., 137 
Fin du Classicisme, La, 175 
Ford, R., 246, 248 
Forest Lovers, The, 230-32 
Fors Clavigera, 380, 383, 387 
Fountain of Tears, The. 389 
Fouqu6, F. de la M., 36, 139, 

140, 153, 162, 167-69, 324, 

363. 373 



Fourteen Sonnets (Bowles), 

55. 58-61 
Fragments from German 

Prose Writers, 162 
Frere, Jno. H., 248 
From Shakspere to Pope, n6 

Gallery of Pigeons, The, 388. 

394. 395 
Gareth and Lynette, 274 
Gaspard de la Nuit, 388 
Gates, L. E., 129, 355, 356 
Gaule Poetique, La, 225 
Gautier, Theophile, 167, 176- 

81, 183-85, 187, 188, 191-93. 

195-98, 202, 219, 221-25, 349. 

388, 393 
Gebir, 235, 237 
G6nie du Christianisme, Le. 

90, 176, 202, 203, 205-08, 363 
Gentle Armour, The, 109, no 
Germ, The, 284 
German Novelists (Roscoe), 

167 
German Poets and Poetry 

(Longfellow) , 167 
German Romance (Carlyle), 

162 
Gierusalemme Liberata, 91 
Girlhood of Mary Virgin. 

The, 287, 290, 291 
Glenfinlas, 13, 22 
Globe, Le, 201, 202 
Goblet, The, 164 
Goblin Market, The, 82 
Godiva, 265 
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 5, 

92, 133, 178, 191, 192 
Golden Legend, The, 297 
Golden Treasury, The, 25, 389 
Golden Wings, 326-28 
Goldsmith, Oliver, 95 
Gorres, Joseph, 138, 147, 152, 

363, 400 
Gosse, Edmund, 116 
Gotz von Berlichingen, 5, 133, 

193 
Gries, J. D.. 156, 247 



Index. 



417 



Grimm, Jakob and Wm., 154, 

162, 247, 256 
Guest, Lady Charlotte, 270 

Hallam, Henry, 103, 399 
Han d'Islande, 196, 218 
Hardiknute, 3 
Harold the Dauntless, 29 
Hartleap Well, 19-21, 80 
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 245 
Hawker, R. S., 262, 263 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 162-64 
Hayley, Wm., 95, 96 
Haystack in the Floods, The, 

326 
Heart of Midlothian, The, 31, 

33. 379 
Heine, Heinrich, 35-3S, 139- 

41, 144, 146-49. 152, 154-59. 

161, 170, 400 
Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 

164-66 
Heir of Redcliffe, The, 357 
Helvellyn, 15, 16 
Henri HI., 209 
Heretic's Tragedy, The, 276 
Hereward the Wake, 281 
Herford, C. H., 12,24, 34. 87, 

88 
Hernani, 186, 188, 195-200 
Hero Worship, 103, in, 335 
Herzensergiessungen eines 

kunstliebenden Klosterbru- 

ders, 152. 153 
Hewlett, Maurice, 230-32 
Higginson, T. W., 163 
Histoire du Romantisme 

(Gautier), 176-81, 183-85, 

187, 188, 191-93, 195-98, 221 

-25 
Histoire du Romantisme en 

France (Toreinx) , 202 
History of France (Michelet), 

226 
History of Literature (Schle- 

gel), 157 
History of Spanish Litera- 
ture, A (Kelly), 246, 247 

27 



History of Spanish Litera- 
ture, A. (Ticknor), 242, 
243. 248 
History of the Crusades, 226 
History of the Swiss Confed- 
eration, 153 
Hita, Perez de, 247 
Hogg, Jas., 250-55 
Holy Cross Day, 277 
Homme qui Rit, L', 219, 221 
Hood, Thos., 278, 279 
House of Life, The, 307, 310 
House of the Wolfings, The, 

232, 337-39- 387 
Howells, W. D., 397, 398 
Howitt, Chas. and Mary, 334 
Hughes, Arthur, 305-07 
Hughes, Thomas., 357, 383 
Hugo, Francois V., 222 
Hugo, Victor. Marie, 90, 137, 
~~T73; 176, 178-82, 188, 189, 
194-96, 200, 214-21, 224, 226, 
247, 277, 298, 299, 349, 388, 

389 
Hunt, Jas. Leigh, 49. 105-13, 

118, 119, 121-23, 127, 388 
Hunt, Wm. H., 283, 284, 288- 

90, 292, 302, 306, 307 
Hurd, Richard, 364 
Hutton, R. H., 40 
Hylas, 331 

Hymns to the Night, 164 
Hypatia, 355 

Hyperion (Keats), 117, 122 
Hyperion (Longfellow), 172 

Idylls of the King, 268-75, 

303, 347 
Illustrations of Tennyson, 

257, 260 
II Penseroso, 374 
Imitation of Spenser (Keats) , 

120 
Inferno, 96, 99, 103, 191 
Intaglios, 393 
Irving, Washington, 239 
Isabella, 123-25, 307, 390, 

400 



4i8 



Index. 



Ivanhoe, 31, 36, 39, 40, 43, 
379. 397 

Jameson, Anna, 374, 375 
Jeffrey, Francis, Lord, 37 
Jenny, 309 
John Inglesant, 357 
Journal des Debats, 201 
Journal of Speculative Phi- 
losophy, The, 166 
Journey into the Blue Dis- 
tance, 162, 163 
Joyce, P. W., 260 
Joyce, R. D., 260 

Keats (Colvin), ir6, 127 

Keats, Jno., 53, 54, 82, 85, 86, 
107, 113-31, 172, 228, 262, 
264, 279, 287, 294, 299, 300, 
306, 307, 314, 315. 342, 388, 
390, 400 

Keble, Jno., 292, 357, 361 

Keith of Ravelston, 262, 263 

Kelly, J. F., 246, 247 

Ker, W. P., 46. 47 

Kilmeny, 252 

Kinder und Hausmarchen, 

154, 162 

King Arthur's Tomb, 327 
Kinges Quair, The, 306, 312 
Kingsley, Chas. , 279-81, 292, 

355, 383. 384 
King's Tragedy, The, 306, 

311-13 
Knaben Wunderhorn, Des, 

155. 172 

Knight, Death, and the Devil, 

The, 152. 153, 324, 373 
Knight's Grave, The, 87 
Kronenwachter, Die, 167 
Kubla Khan. 87 

Lady of Shalott, The, 265, 

271. 303. 304 324 
Lady of the Lake, The, 19, 

29, 251, 379 
Lament for the Decline of 
Chivalry, 279 



Lamia, 117, 129 

Landor, W. S., 16, 20, 27, 53, 

54, 117. 235, 237, 395 
Lang, Andrew, 330 
Lara, 233 

Laus Veneris, 343, 349 
Lay of the Brown Rosary. 

The, 277, 278 
Lay of the Last Minstrel, 

The, 3, 5, II, 25-28, 40, 53, 

85, 252 
Lays of Ancient Rome, 249 
Lays of France, 389, 390 
Lays of the Western Gael, 

260 
Leading Cases done into 

Equity. 249 
Legends of the Cid, 246 
Lenore, 83, 133, 144, 192, 297, 

392 
Leper, The, 349 
Lesser, Creuz6 de, 225 
Letters on Chivalry and Ro- 
mance, 364 
Letters on Demonology and 

Witchcraft, 41 
Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet, 

226 
Lewis, M. G., 77, 83, 238, 239 
Liberal Movement in English 

Literature, The, 314 
Life and Death of Jason, 

The, 315, 321, 328-32 
Life and Letters of Dean 

Church. The, 358 
Life of William Morris, The 

(Mackail), 315, 320, 331, 

333, 382 
Light of the World, The, 288- 

90 
Lindsay, A. W. C, 372-74 
Lines on a Bust of Dante, 105 
Literary Reminiscences (De 

Quincey), 38 
Literature and Romance of 

Northern Europe, 334 
Literature of Europe, The 

(Hallam) , 103 



Index. 



419 



Locbhart, J. G., 5, 7, 9, 11, 22, 

23. 239, 247, 248 
Locrine, 346 
Longfellow, H. W., 105, 109, 

164, 167, 170. 172, 239, 297 
Lord of the Isles, The, Z9, 

85 
Lorenzaccio, 226 
Lorenzo and Isabella, 287, 291 
Loss and Gain, 357, 359 
Love, 86, 127 
Love is Enough, 332, 333 
Lovers of Gudrun, The, 330, 

334-36 
Lowell, J. R., 70, 82, 93. 116, 

131, 165, 203, 260 
Lucinde, 157 

Luck of Edenhall, The, 170 
Liirlei, Die, 141 
Lyra Innocentium, 357 
Lyrical Ballads, 18, 48, 74 

Mabinogion, The, 270, 332 
Macaulay, T. B., 103, 249 
Mackail, W. J., 315, 320. 331, 

333. 382 
McLaughlin, E. T., 43 
Madoc, 237 

Mador of the Moor, 251 
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 326 
Maidens of Verdun, The, 216 
Maids of Elfin-Mere, The, 

258, 304. 324 
Maigron. L., 33, 34, 44-46 
Mallet, P. H., 107, 229 
Malory, Sir Thos., 270, 272, 

303. 347. 348 
Manfred, 234 
Mangan, J. C., 259, 260 
Manzoni, Alessandro, 133 
Marchen (Tieck), 162 
Marie de France, 390, 393 
Marienlieder, 148 
Marino Faliero, 234 
Marion Delorme, 200 
Marmion, 6, 15, 23, 29, 40, 90, 

379 
Martyrs, Les, 225 



Marzials, Th^ophile, 285, 387, 

388, 394, 395 
Masque of Queen Bersabe, 

The, 277, 344 
Masque of Shadows, The, 

390, 392 
Meinhold, J. W., 42, 280 
Merimee, Prosper, 30, 33 
Michaud, J. F., 226 
Michelet, Jules, 226 
Middle Ages, The (Hallam), 

103 
Millais, J. E., 283-85, 287, 

288, 290, 291, 307 
Milton, Jno., 93, 103, 269, 374 
Minstrelsy, Ancient and Mod- 
ern (Motherwell), 253 
Minstrelsy of the Scottish 

Border. 21, 22, 24, 26, 243, 

250, 251 
Modern Painters, 6, 10, 284, 

292, 294 
Mores Catholici, 319, 36^ 
Morgante Maggiore, 234 
Morris, Wm. , 29, 232, 237, 

275, 285, 296, 304-06, 309, 

314-40, 345, 350, 380, 382, 

384-89 
Morte Darthur (Malory) , 106, 

270, 273, 303, 304, 324, 347, 

364 
Morte d' Arthur (Tennyson), 

271, 272 

Motherwell, Wm., 250, 253-55 
Mozley, T.. 358 
Miiller, Johannes, 153 
Munera Pulveris, 380 
Muse Frangaise, La, 201 
Music Master, The, 258, 300 
Musset, Alfred de, 180, 189, 

198, 226, 247 
Myller, H., 154 
Mysteries of Udolpho, 83 

Nanteuil, Celestin, 178, 223- 

25 
Nature of Gothic, The, 321, 

375. 385. 386 



420 



Index. 



Nerval. Gerai-d de, 190-92, 

196, 197. 225, 349 
New Essays toward a Critical 

Method. 122 
Newman, J. H., 292, 319. 

354-62, 366, 381 
News from Nowhere. 317. 

319. 382. 386 
Nibelungeulied.The, 154, 155, 

297 
Nodier. Chas., 194 
Northern Antiquities. 107. 229 
Northern Mythology. 334 
N6tre Dame de Paris, 178, 

179, 221, 224 

Novalis. 134. 137. 148, 152, 
164-67, 172, 302, 400 

Ode to a Dead Bodj-, no 
Ode to a Grecian Urn. 117 
Ode to the West Wind, 102 
Odes et Ballades (Hugo), 176, 

180, 189, 217 

Odes et Poesies Diverses 

(Hugo) , 214 
Odyssey, The, 331 
Ogier the Dane, 330. 332 
Old Celtic Romances, 260 
Old Masters at Florence, 316 
Old Mortality, 31, 33, 253, 

379 

Old Woman of Berkeley, The, 
238, 239 

Oliphant, F.. 353 

On First Looking into Chap- 
man's Homer. 117. 122 

Oriana, 265, 313, 324 

Orientales, Les, 189 

Orlando Furioso, 90, 91, 109 

O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 387- 

90. 393 
Ossian. 208, 261 

Palgrave. F. T., 25, 389 
Palmerin of England, 236, 241 
Paradiso, 311 

Parochial and Plain Sermons, 
360 



Parsons, T. W., 105 
Partenopex of Blois, 90 
Past and Present, 381, 382 
Pater, Walter, 42, 79 
Payne, Jno., 387-93 
Perrault, Chas., 194, 265, 349 
Percy, Thos., 3, 54, 57. 74, 

159. 238, 295 
Petrarca, Francesco, 92 
Phantasus, 160 
Pillar of the Cloud, The, 362 
Poe, Edgar A., 162, 163, 300, 

301, 389 
Poems and Ballads (Swin- 
burne), 296, 339, 343. 345, 
349. 350 
Poems and Romances (Sim- 
cox), 388 
Poems by the Way, 386 
Poets and Poetry of Munster, 

259 
Politics for the People, 383 
Pollock, Sir Frederick, 249 
Pope, Alexander, 52-54, 56, 

63-73. 115-17. 402 
Portrait, The, 311 
Praeterita, 372. 378 
Preface to Cromwell, 182, 188, 

218-20 
Pre-Raphaelitism (Ruskin), 

293 
Price, Sir Uvedale. 34. 374 
Primer of French Literature, 

A, 183. 184 
Prince Arthur (Blackmore), 

270 
Prince des Sots, Le, 225 
Princess. The, 267, 268 
Prior, Matthew, 401 
Prophecy of Dante, The, 100, 

lOI 

Proverbs in Porcelain, 401 

Psyche, 121 

Pugin, A. C, 368 

Pugin, A. "W. N., 360, 361, 

368-72. 375, 379 
Pugin. E. W.. 368 
Purgatorio, 362 



Index. 



421 



Queen Gwynnevar's Round, 

262 
Queenhoo Hall, 8, 20, 32 
Queen Mab, 235 
Queen's Wake, The, 252, 

253 
Quentin Durward, 31, 36 
Quest of the Sancgreall. The 

(Westwood) , 276 
Quest of the Sangreal, The 

(Hawker), 262 
Quiberon, 216 

Racine et Shakspere, 38, 1S6, 

208, 211, 213 
Radcliflfe, Anne, 41, 42, 82, 

193 
Rapunzel, 309, 326, 327 
Raven, The, 301 
Reade, Chas., 230 
Rebecca and Rowena, 397 
R6cits Merovingiens, 226 
Recollections of D. G. Ros- 

setti (Caine), 296, 297, 301, 

302, 308 
Reliques of Ancient English 

Poetry, 3, 17, 74, 107, 229, 

238, 243, 247 
Reminiscences (Mozley), 35S 
Remorse, 86, 89 
Richter, J. P. F., 169 
Rime of Redemption, The, 

392 
Rime of the Duchess May, 

The, 277, 278 
Rivas, Duke de, 246 
Robertson, J. M., 122 
Rogers, Chas., 96 
Roi s'Amuse, Le, 200, 201 
Rokeby, 29 
Romancero General, The, 

243, 247 
Roman Historique, Le. 33, 

34. 44-46 
Romantische Schule, Die 

(Heine) , 36, 139-41 
Romaunt of the Page, The, 

277 



Roots of the Mountains, The, 

337, 338 
Rosa, Martinez de la, 246 
Rosamond, 346, 347 
Rosamund, Queen of the 

Goths, 346 
Roscoe, Wm., 65, 66 
Rose, W. S., 90 
Rose Mary, 263, 311, 312 
Rossetti, Christina, 82, 2S2, 

284, 302 
Rossetti, D. G.. 131, 228, 258, 

262, 263, 265, 282-88, 290-92, 

295-315. 318-21, 323, 324, 

340, 343. 345, 350, 387-89. 

393 
Rossetti, Gabriele, 282 
Rossetti, Maria F., 282 
Rossetti, W. M., 282, 284 
Runenberg, The, 163 
Ruskin, Jno., 6, 10, 284, 286- 

89, 292-94, 304, 317, 321, 

324, 371, 372, 375-80, 382-87, 

398 

Sacred and Legendary Art, 

374, 375 
Saint Agnes, 267 
Saint Brandan, 263 
Saint Dorothy, 344 
Saint Patrick's Purgatory, 

238 
Saintsbury, George, 50, 118, 

183, 184, 295, 324, 326, 395, 

396 
Saints' Tragedy, The, 279. 

280, 292 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge und 

die Englische Romantik, 

50-55, 75, 77, 82, 86 
Scherer, Wm., 167, 170 
Schiller, J. C. F., 210, 212 
Schlegel, A. W.. 88, 140, 144, 

145, 154. 156-59. 162, 165, 

172, 192, 247 
Schlegel, F.,99, 134. i35, i37, 

148, 151, 157-59, 172, 247, 

363 



422 



Index. 



Sctot, Sir Walter, 1-47, 49, 
50. 52. 53. 71, 75, 77,85, 87, 
88, 90, 91, 119, 120, 127, 129, 
136, 158, 167, 169, 172, 173, 
178, 180, 192, 212, 226, 232, 
243, 246, 247, 249-53, 256, 
267, 295, 313, 320, 321, 323, 
329, 352-56. 367. 378, 379. 
397. 402 

Scott, W. B.. 292, 293, 305-07, 
353. 389 

Selections from Newman, 355, 
356 

Seward, Anne, 98 

Shairp, J. C, 18 

Shaker Bridal, The, 164 

Shakspere, Wm., 210, 222, 399 

Sharp, Wm., 291, 292, 306 

Shelley, P. B., 8, 25, loi, 102, 
120, 232-35, 299, 310, 340, 
398 

Short History of English Lit- 
erature, A, 50, 118, 295, 324, 
326. 395. 396 

Shorthouse, J. H.. 357 

Short Studies (Higginson), 
163 

Sigerson, Jno., 259, 261 

Sigismonda and Guiscardo, 
124, 125 

Sigurd the Volsung. 336 

Simcox, G. A., 388 

Sintram and his Companions, 
153, 162, j68, 324, 373 

Sir Floris, 390-92 

Sir Galahad (Morris), 306, 
325. 328 

Sir Galahad (Tennyson), 
267, 271, 325 

Sir Lancelot and Queen Gui- 
nivere, 271, 325 

Sir Tristram, 7 

Sister Helen, 311, 312, 345 

Sisters, The, 265, 313 

Sizeranne, R. de la, 293 

Sketches of Christian Art, 

372-74 
Sleep and Poetry, 1 14-16 



Sleeping Beauty, The, 265 
Smith, Charlotte, 55 
Socialism, 386 

Song at the Feast of Brough- 
am Castle, 18, 19 
Song of the Western Men, 262 
Sonneur do Saint Paul, Le, 

193 
Sorrows of Werther, The, 397 
Southey, Robert, 50, 51, 55, 

71. 235-39, 355 
Specimen of an Induction to 

a Poem, 129 
Specimens of German Ro- 
mance, 167 
Specimens of Gothic Archi- 
tecture, 368 
Spenser, Edmund, 3, 4, 93, 

107, 120-22. 269, 275, 329 
Stael, Mme.de, 134, 139, 141- 

45, 171, 192, 208 
Staff and Scrip, 311 
Stedman, E. C., 265, 387 
Stendhal, De, 36-38, 186, 187, 

201, 208-14 
Stephen, Leslie. 10. 38, 80 
Sternbald's Wanderungen, 

152 
Stevenson, R. L., 32 
Stokes, Whitley, 259, 261 
Stolberg, F. L., Count, 149, 

363 
Stones of Venice, 321, 375-79. 

385. 386 
Stories from the Italian Poets, 

109-1 I 
Stor)' of Rimini, The, 105-07, 

119, 121, 122, 390 
Story of the Brave Casper and 

the Fair Annerl, The, 167 
Student of Salamanca, The, 

246 
Studies and Appreciations, 

129 
Studies in Mediaeval Life and 

Literature, 43 
Study of Celtic Literature, 

On the, 256 



Index. 



423 



Succube, La, 42 

Sundering Flood, The, 232, 

337, 339 
Swinburne, A. C, 275, 276, 
296, 304, 309, 314, 315, 319, 
339-51. 387-89 

Table Talk (Coleridge), 12 
Tables Turned, The, 386 
Tale of Balen, The, 347, 348 
Tale of King Constans, The, 

330 
Tales of Wonder. 238 
Talisman, The, 28, 36, 43 
Tannhauser, 153, 160, 264, 

343, 391 
Task, The, 58 

Tasso, Torquato, 91, 104, 109 
Taylor, Edgar, 162 
Taylor, Wm., 53, 162, 238 
Templars in Cyprus, The,. 149 
Tennj'son, Alfred, 257, 260, 

262, 264-75, 295, 303, 324, 

325, 347, 348 
'I'hackeray, W. M,, 397, 398, 

402 
Thalaba the Destroyer, 235 
Theocritus, 331 
Thierry, Augustin, 39, 225, 

226 
Thomas the Rhymer, 7 
Thoreau. H. D., 165 
Thorpe, Benjamin, 334 
Thousand and One Nights, 

The, 393 
Three Bardic Tales, 259 
Three Fishers, The, 383 
Thyrsis, 378 

Ticknor, Geo., 242,243, 248 
Tieck, Ludwig, 42, 134. 137, 

148, 150, 152, 154, 156-65, 

172, 245, 400 
Tighe, Mary, 121 
Tintern Abbey, 358 
Todhunter, Jno., 259, 261 
Tom Brown at Oxford, 357 
Tracts for the Times, 292, 

319, 363. 368 



Treasury of Irish Poetry, A, 
261 

Tristram and Iseult (Arnold) , 
275. 278, 341 

Tristram of Lyonesse (Swin- 
burne), 275. 340 

Tristram und Isolde (Wag- 
ner), 393 

Troy Town, 315 

True Principles of Pointed 
Architecture, The, 372 

Tune of Seven Towers, The, 
305, 326 

Two Foscari, The, 234 

Uhland, Ludwig, 140, 154-56, 

170, 171 
Ulalume, 301 
Undine, 168 
Unto this Last, 380 

Vabre, Jule, 222 

Vanity Fair, 396 

Vathek, 367 

Vere, Aubrey de, 259, 260, 

358, 361. 366 
Verses on Various Occasions 

(Newman), 357 
Versunkene Glocke, Die, 245 
Victorian Poets, 265, 387 
Vignettes in Rhyme, 401 
Vigny, A. V., Comte de, 188, 

191, 210 
Villon, Frangois, 298, 299, 

350, 393 
Vision of Judgment, The, 70 
Vita Nuova, La, loi, 299, 302, 

310. 393 
Volksmarchen (Tieck) , 160 
Volsunga Saga, The, 334, 335 
Voltaire, F. M. A. de, 92, 94, 

95 
Vorlesungen iiber drama- 

tische Kunst und Litteratur 

(Schlegel), 88, 158, 162, 192 
Voss, J. H., 149 
Voyage of Maeldune, The, 

260 



424 



Index. 



Wackenroder, W. H. , 134, 

152, 153. 159 
Wagner, Richard, 153, 264, 

391. 393 
Walladmor, 38 
Walter Scott et la Princesse 

de Cleves, 36 
Ward. W. G., 360 
Warton, Joseph, 61, 63, 64, 

71, 73. 157. 158 
Warton, Thos., 27. 57, 60, 61, 

94, 157, 158 
Water Lady, The, 279 
Water of the Wondrous Isles, 

The, 337, 339 
Watts, Theodore, 300 
Waverley Novels, The, 30-39, 

324, 378, 379. 403 
Welland River, 328, 345 
Welshmen of Tirawley, The, 

260 
Werner, Zacharias, 148, 149, 

212, 302 
Westwood, Thos., 276 
White Doe of Rylstone, The, 

16-18 
White Ship, The, 311, 312 



William George Ward and 

the Oxford Movement. 361 
Winthrop, Theodore, 367 
Wisdom and Languages of 

India, The. 157 
Wissenschaftslehre (Fichte) , 

137 
Witch of Fife, The. 252 
Wood beyond the World, The, 

337. 339 

Woolner, Thos.. 284 

Wordsworth, Wm., 9, 12, 14- 
20. 48. 50-55, 71, 77. 80 89, 
119, 300, 333, 355, 358, 398 

Yarrovi? Revisited, 14 
Yeast, 383 
Yeats, J. B., 261 
Yonge, Charlotte M., 357 
Yuletide Stories, 334 

Zapolya. 89 
Zauberring, Der, 168 
Zeitung fiir Einsiedler, 138, 

172 
Zorrilla, Jos6 de, 246 



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